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From HackingUsability
Welcome!
On this site you'll find materials related to the open source usability research conducted by Michael Terry, his students, and other contributors and researchers.
The primary goal of our research is simply stated: We want to study and improve usability/UX/design practices in the free/open source software (FOSS) community to enable the creation of world-class, innovative, intuitive, and elegant open source software. We are particularly interested in investigating how the FOSS community can do design/usability in ways not possible or feasible in closed source, commercial software development.
In addition to this website, you can follow Michael via:
- Twitter (ingimpguy)
- identi.ca (hackingusability) and
- his blog: http://hackingusability.wordpress.com
Projects
- Adaptable GIMP (in progress) http://adaptablegimp.blogspot.com
- ingimp: http://www.ingimp.org
- StatsJam: http://www.statsjam.org
Presentations
- Ubuntu Developer's Summit, November 2009: Hacking Usability: The Art of Creating Innovative, Intuitive, and Powerful User Interfaces
- Blender Conference, October 2009 (similar to talk linked above)
- Mozilla, July 2009: Usability in an Open Source World
- Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) 2009: ingimp: A Smorgasbord of Usability, Adaptive UIs, and Visually Arresting Graphics
- Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) 2008: ingimp 1 Year Later
- Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) 2007: Interaction Mirrors: Reflecting Real-World Use of ingimp
Projects We Need Help With
There are a number of projects we would like to do based on the results of our research. If you're interested in any of these projects, please email Michael Terry.
| Project Title | Project Description |
|---|---|
| Privacy-Sensitive Logging Libary | In our work with ingimp, we've spent a lot of time looking at the problem of logging usage data in a way that minimizes privacy concerns. What we'd like to do is create a generic privacy-sensitive logging library for others to use in their own instrumentation efforts. Realistically, this project would take a couple of weeks to get off-the-ground. |
| ASCII Art GUI Prototyping Tool | People mock-up interfaces with a variety of tools, including GLADE, GIMP/Photoshop, Inkscape/Illustrator, and Keynote/PowerPoint. Mock-ups help developers and designers get essential feedback, but it's difficult for others to modify these mock-ups because they're generally posted as JPGs or PNGs.
What we'd like to do is create a GUI prototyping tool that renders its output as ASCII art. ASCII art can be pasted directly into emails and IRC chats, allowing prototypes to exist in-line with design discussions, rather than on separate webpages. Additionally, if designed correctly, the ASCII art prototypes could be pasted back into the tool, where it would be able to recognize all of the widgets in the prototype (e.g., buttons, menus, text fields, etc.) so people could edit the mock-ups and post their proposed changes in an ongoing email or IRC discussion. |
| StatsJam | StatsJam (http://www.statsjam.org) is a MediaWiki extension that enables database queries to be created in wiki text. We use it for ingimp analysis. We need someone to take this project over and continue development on it. |
Other Links
You may also be interested in our other research projects at the University of Waterloo's HCI Lab:
