During the summer of 2009, I had the good fortune of taking part in the Red Hat POSSE programme, meeting a bunch of excellent open source peeps, and getting a sense for how I might introduce more of my students to the world of open source contribution. This last spring, my colleague and I introduced 40 first-year students to the Fedora project. This semester, I’d like to introduce y’all to a few more.
This semester I will be leading eight intrepid students in an exploration of interface design and development at Allegheny College. Your open source project (or a small part of a larger project) could benefit greatly from these students, if you’re interested.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
I want developers/managers from “projects” that have a GUI. I say “projects” because you might be the lead on, say, a network settings dialog box that is part of Fedora. You need to be of the mindset that your GUI could always be better, but you never seem to have the time to sit down and do heuristic evaluations, sit users and do interaction testing, and so on. If we work with you, you also have to commit to being timely in responding to the students—most likely on your developer mailing lists—because we can’t wait for two weeks to go by in a 14-week semester while we’re waiting to hear back from you. (I’m not talking about 5-minute response times, but if you can’t reply to email from people trying to make your project better within 24-48 hours, please don’t respond.)
Basically, we ask that your community be reasonably responsive, and we’ll be doing all the work.
WHAT WE WILL DO FOR YOU
Small teams of students will, throughout the semester, engage one or more of these projects as budding interface designers. They have no prior experience in this regard, but will be engaging material on lo-fi prototyping, usability, the psychology of interface design, and so on. We will be discussing this material (which we will try and do in as open a manner as possible) and directly applying what we learn to the interfaces that are part of your project.
The students will work within your community, using your tools (mailing lists, wikis, etc.). I do not expect them to implement their designs, although some of them may be capable of doing so, and they might even do it. This, however, will not be a requirement of the course. (Not everyone in the course is capable.) If their work is good, and you like what you see, we only ask that you give their efforts serious consideration for implementation… we’re working with you because we don’t want to be doing interface design and testing in the abstract, but instead we want to add value to real projects through our efforts.
SOUND GOOD TO YOU?
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If it does, please drop me an email (mjadud at allegheny dot edu). If you’d like to talk to me on the phone, I’m happy to chat—92JADUDM92 is my Google Voice number, which… well, it’s new to me, so we’ll see what happens. I don’t (yet) have the course website up, but it will probably live here when it goes live… |
This sounds like a great idea! Looking forward to your class’s results.
This is an excellent idea, because it brings real value to both parties. Projects get interaction design help, and your students get real-life experience. I wish more people within the educational system would make use of such opportunities when it comes to free and open source software.
I will consider applying with one of the projects I am involved with, after I’ve made sure that we (as a project) have got the necessary interest and resources to make the most of it.
In any case I wish you good luck, and hope that you follow up with reports progress and results.
Usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing – whether it’s a web site, remote control, or revolving door – for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated. — Steve Krug