[Usability] Usability internship with GNOME

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt <jan inquata com>]

Hey GNOME / Usability folks :-)

I am currently studying information design at Stuttgart Media
University in Germany. In our 5th semester (October 2010 – February
2011), we are to go into practice. Being Ubuntu user, passionate about
usability testing, interaction- / interface- / information design and
interested in open source collaboration, I would like to work related
to GNOME.

Our studies are mainly about researching, designing and testing with
the user; contextual inquiry, eye-tracking and so forth. I am
currently testing Ubuntu + GNOME with friends and family. ;-) I mainly
experiment with panel layout, verbalisation of application names and
visibility of system features / options.

I try to get more into programming but my current love is usability
testing and refining. I have personal experience with coding for the
web (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP) but very little when it comes to higher
languages. (I think really not enough to mention. I am planning on
learning Ruby/Rails though.)

You can find me and my work at http://inquata.com – I would love to
get an internship related to GNOME. The time frame is a little
restricting but working in a foreign (especially English-speaking)
country will be no problem.

As I do not have a good grasp of the organisational structures and the
crucial points in GNOME yet, I would greatly appreciate a mentor from
the community helping me get into it. :-)

I am also wondering about Season of Usability
<http://season.openusability.org>. GNOME participated in 2009; I am
not sure what happened to the project (and openusability in general)
as it seems to be inactive since almost a year.


Thanks to Jono, Stormy and Brian for the help so far!

Regards, Jan