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ukkoss_project · 03-10-2014, 09:03 AM

Greetings!

We are a usability research team consisting of 5 students from the Computer Science / Information Processing Sciences department at University of Oulu, Finland. All five of us are in the latter half of our studies, working on our Master's degrees. As part of our studies, our task is to research usability of open-source software and usability activities within the OSS community. We've decided to base our research on calibre, as it fits the scope and intentions of our project (software aimed at ordinary people; has an active community; is under active development, project isn’t too small or too big, etc.).

As usability experts, our job is to represent the ordinary users, presenting improvement ideas in terms developers can understand, backed by data collected from expert evaluations and usability tests. The point is not to dumb calibre down but to streamline its functionality. So far we have conducted cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic evaluations and have just started doing usability tests in a lab.

We would love to contribute to the calibre project in any way we possibly can. The first step from our part would be to make a summary of the results of the usability activities we have conducted so far and present it to the community. We are also willing to make an effort in helping bring about our proposed changes to the best of our ability.

We'd like to know how interested overall the calibre community is in usability, and what kind of usability activities might be appreciated. We know that there has been some usability-related discussion in the forums in the past, but haven't been able to deduct if there's some general consensus on the state of calibre's current usability.

Our team has the additional support and usability expertise of university teacher Mikko Rajanen and professor Kari Kuutti. We believe that our usability efforts could benefit the calibre project.

Drop us a line - tell us what you think about this kind of project?

BR, UKKOSS13 team:

Kaisu, Lassi, Jari, Ville, Arto

03-10-2014, 09:03 AM	#1
ukkoss_project Junior Member Posts: 6 Karma: 10 Join Date: Mar 2014 Device: none	UKKOSS13: A university project on calibre usability Greetings! We are a usability research team consisting of 5 students from the Computer Science / Information Processing Sciences department at University of Oulu, Finland. All five of us are in the latter half of our studies, working on our Master's degrees. As part of our studies, our task is to research usability of open-source software and usability activities within the OSS community. We've decided to base our research on calibre, as it fits the scope and intentions of our project (software aimed at ordinary people; has an active community; is under active development, project isn’t too small or too big, etc.). As usability experts, our job is to represent the ordinary users, presenting improvement ideas in terms developers can understand, backed by data collected from expert evaluations and usability tests. The point is not to dumb calibre down but to streamline its functionality. So far we have conducted cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic evaluations and have just started doing usability tests in a lab. We would love to contribute to the calibre project in any way we possibly can. The first step from our part would be to make a summary of the results of the usability activities we have conducted so far and present it to the community. We are also willing to make an effort in helping bring about our proposed changes to the best of our ability. We'd like to know how interested overall the calibre community is in usability, and what kind of usability activities might be appreciated. We know that there has been some usability-related discussion in the forums in the past, but haven't been able to deduct if there's some general consensus on the state of calibre's current usability. Our team has the additional support and usability expertise of university teacher Mikko Rajanen and professor Kari Kuutti. We believe that our usability efforts could benefit the calibre project. Drop us a line - tell us what you think about this kind of project? BR, UKKOSS13 team: Kaisu, Lassi, Jari, Ville, Arto