New activities: the Gnome Usability Tutors

[zinie cs unibo it (Enrico Zini)]

Hi everybody!

Here's the other activity I'm proposing:


 * The Gnome Usability Tutors

 Goals:

    Most Gnome developers are not usability experts and they are not
    supposed to be.  Many of them know it, and are embarassed by usability
    issues because they have difficulties in handling them.
    "There's a usability problem here?  Why?  How should I fix it?"
    These are questions that often remain unanswered, and usability
    problems remain.  The UI Guidelines can help with general issues, but
    they can't cover the specific problems that appear in every single
    application.
    In that case, who're you gonna call?
    
    <insert GhostBusters theme here>

    The Gnome Usability Tutors!

 
    The goal here is building a team of usability experts who can:
    
     - tutor Gnome developers on their UI design:
	- verifying compliance of apps/libs with the developer's goals
	  (here the Gnome Improvements Infrastructure previously described
	  could help in finding out what these goals are), maybe giving
	  ratings or awards or something similar when an application
	  complies with its goals
        - giving suggestions to the developers when problems are found
	- finding and training new tutors ("the Ergonomics are powerful in this
	  young boy..."), to be able to help a wider range of developers
     - try to understand "the big picture" of Gnome usability:
        - identifying common problems and trying to find solutions
        - identifying common open questions to submit to the Usability Labs
	  interested in doing research on Gnome (SUN, MIT and Ximian come
	  to my mind at the moment)
 
 
 Plan of action:
 
    0) Get feedback on the project in the usability list, and radically
       change everything that's written here
    1) Find usability experts interested in tutoring some applications
    2) Find some usability apprentice to work at the side of the experts
    3) Define what data is needed to be harvested by the Gnome
       Improvements Infrastructure to back usability researches
    4) Decide one or two Gnome artifacts to tutor (to test the system)
    5) Get feedback, improve, get new tutors, cover more Gnome artifacts,
       conquer the world.


 People involved:
 
    At the moment just myself, with the problem that I'm not actually an
    usability expert, even if I have some instruction on Ergonomics and
    Usability.  When I'll be doing my master thesis, I'll have perhaps the
    time to study more and build greather experience, and I'll also have the
    backing of some usability experts in my university, but this should
    be a Team, so this project will have sense only if others will step
    forward and wear the Gnome Usability Tutor uniform.

    Ehi, but that is a great thing to do!  Think about it!  You'll be the
    GUTs of Gnome!  What are you waiting for? :-)



My ideas have now been written.
I'm waiting for some feedback.
Please be rude.


				Ciao! Enrico

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