Usability Bazaar: Goals

In yesterday’s entry, I announced the launch of a new mail­ing list ded­i­cated to usabil­ity in Open Source soft­ware. How­ever, I had not clearly stated goals. Here are some of my thoughts on what we could accomplish.

Good/Bad Prac­tice

In this first step, we would high­light good and bad usabil­ity issues with major open source prod­ucts. How­ever, part of this requires an effort in terms of fig­ur­ing out quick wins in terms of fixes vs. things that may take longer to fix. The idea here is to high­light some of the basic best prac­tices that open source users might consider.

Guide­lines

This is prob­a­bly going to be tricky but what I’d like to see arise out of dis­cus­sion is the pos­si­bil­ity of cre­at­ing a doc­u­ment (or set of doc­u­ments) that could help open source devel­op­ers get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of usabil­ity issues. This might help in edu­cat­ing the com­mu­nity as to what to think of when cre­at­ing new tools.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

This is another dif­fi­cult point to address but there needs to be good com­mu­ni­ca­tion as to what can be done to fix a prob­lem. And, mov­ing for­ward, com­mu­ni­ca­tion regard­ing suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion of more usable fea­tures in an open source prod­uct. If, every time a new ver­sion of open source soft­ware comes out, it shows improve­ments in terms of mak­ing it eas­ier for peo­ple to use, we should try to high­light that. The best and worst issues list will go some of the way but we need to define a clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy to tout the ease of use of open source prod­ucts in front of the press and of poten­tial users. This will allow to get over the men­tal bar­rier that open source prod­ucts are gen­er­ally dif­fi­cult to use.

This is just a start and I hope it will kick off dis­cus­sions on the list. In the mean­time, why not sub­scribe to the list!