Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 01:25:52 -0700
From: Eugene Eric Kim <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: FLOSS usability synopsis
Organization: Blue Oxen Associates
X-URL: http://www.blueoxen.org/

Hi Doc,

Here's a quick summary of why we organized the FLOSS Usability Sprint
last February, what emerged, and what we plan next. Feel free to use
as much or as little as you'd like, and don't hesitate to follow-up if
you have questions. You can get more details from our web site at
http://www.flossusability.org/.

The motivation for the event was multi-layered. We wanted to figure
out a way to make open source software more usable. Both Blue Oxen
Associates and Aspiration believe strongly in open source and use it
regularly ourselves, so we had a strong stake in the outcome. Both of
us also care strongly about nonprofit organizations and believe that
poor usability is one of the impediments for wider adoption of open
source among nonprofits.

The question was, how do you do this? Do you hold training sessions
for developers? Do you write papers? Do you fund usability
consultants to work with open source projects? All of these are part
of the solution, but if we focused on only one of them, we would only
have a small impact.

I viewed the problem of open source usability as a collaboration
problem (convenient, of course, because I'm in the business of
facilitating collaboration). There's a knowledge gap between the
usability and the open source communities, but the problem is actually
that the two communities weren't previously motivated to learn about
each other and to close that gap. It's a bit ironic, because these
two communities share a lot of values -- iterative improvement,
user-centrism, a desire to improve things. They _should_ have been
collaborating with each other, but they weren't. Our goal was to
build shared understanding between these two communities and then to
see what happened.

We started with as large and diverse of a group as possible -- six
open source projects, mostly with nonprofit bents (Activist
Mobilization Platform, Chandler, CivicSpace, FotoNotes, Identity
Commons, OpenACS), 12 usability specialists, and a mix of developers
and project managers -- a total of 40 people. We had three sponsors
(OSAF, DDJ, and Linux Magazine -- we'd love Linux Journal for the next
one :-) and five supporters, all of whom were very helpful.

The stated goal was straightforward and concrete -- each group was to
work on improving the usability of some aspect of their projects in
three days. On the second day, we brought in about 15 users to help
with this process.

The unstated goal was to catalyze ongoing collaboration between these
two communities. The event was highly interactive and was expertly
facilitated by the good folks at Aspiration (who do Penguin Day and
other excellent events). We emphasized concrete outcomes, reporting
out, and self-documenting on our Wiki.

We accomplished both of our goals and then some. Each project
improved in concrete ways. Everyone learned something. Open source
developers learned practical usability techniques, but more
importantly, they were _motivated_ to learn more. The
learning-by-doing approach rather than training was critical here. A
follow-up bootcamp will be much more effective if the developers are
motivated and if they have a context for which to understand these
techniques.

The usability folks learned _a lot_ about open source development.
There were many misconceptions both ways, and the opportunity to work
closely together in such an intense, high-energy, accelerated, and
most importantly fun environment helped build shared understanding.
Curiously, I discovered that the usability folks hungered for an
opportunity like this. For one thing, most usability practitioners
never collaborate with each other. They have good professional
groups, such as CHI and UXnet, but they rarely work in twos. A lot of
folks approached me afterwards and exclaimed how much they enjoyed
working with other usability people. These usability folks also
hungered to do some good and make an impact. One problem with
usability in corporate environments is that you can't talk about your
work. You can point to a final product (maybe), but you can't point
to the analysis and methodologies that got you there. You can't show
how crappy the project was before you came along. A huge benefit for
usability practitioners to work with open source projects is simply
the ability to talk about it afterwards.

One theme that emerged is that usability and open source have an
inherent tension. The usability mantra is, "You are not your own
user." The open source mantra is, "Scratch your own itch." On the
surface, these two philosophies seem contradictory. I think if you
dig deeper into both of these, you'll find that it's not that simple.
I'm also confident that collaboration will resolve these tensions.
There are very smart folks in both of these communities. Again, they
just needed to discover the motivation (and have the space to
collaborate).

Two interesting and unexpected concepts and projects emerged from the
event. The first was the notion of extreme usability, which I
mentioned at the meeting today. Usability is like security; it's not
something you can just tack on at the end. The best route to usable
software is to incorporate it into the process from the very
beginning. As all of us explored this notion further, we converged on
this analog to pair programming, where you partner a usability person
with a developer. This resonated strongly with a lot of folks, but I
think Mary was the most enthused, because she had had previous
positive experiences with it (I believe you blogged about it a while
back).

The project I'm most excited about is called OpenWebGUI, because it
shows the kinds of unique and powerful collaboration that open source
enables. We had three CMSes there, and throughout the weekend, they
realized that they were faced with similar usability problems. For
example, all of them wanted more usable administrative systems. Even
though they are all different systems, the functionality and workflow
is essentially the same. These projects realized -- independently of
any of us -- that because they were faced with the same problem, they
were better off working together than in silos. They started a
project called OpenWebGUI, which will focus initially on CMS
administration GUIs. They will do an analysis, develop some HTML
prototypes, and test those. The tested, usable HTML files will be
released under an open source license, so that any CMS can incorporate
them and customize them as they see fit. What I love about this
outcome is it vividly illustrates the exponential returns that open
source enables. We spent a bit of money to bring improve these
projects, and yet the outcome will very likely improve the entire
ecosystem of related projects. Now that's ROI!

Finally, the future. Many folks involved with CHI are interested in
being more involved with open source, and we are actively working to
facilitate this. Jan Muehlig, a usability specialist who flew in from
Germany to participate, has an outstanding project called
OpenUsability.org, where he's trying to connect usability folks with
open source projects. Jan did some excellent work with KDE, and we're
actively trying to promote his stuff. And we've got a long list of
projects and people who want to participate in the next sprint. It's
all buzz -- there's been very little coverage of the event, other than
in people's blogs, but we've gotten great word of mouth, and we have
an active mailing list.

We're going to do a followup sprint at the end of July, where we'll
bring back a good percentage of our previous participants and mix them
with some new blood. We'll incorporate what we learned from this past
sprint to improve the next one, and we'll also experiment with some
new ideas. And we'll continue to engage with the community as a
whole. These events are meant to perturb the ecosystem and catalyze
the community. We encourage folks to participate, and we encourage
those we can't (as well as those who do) to engage with us and with
each other, to participate in this ongoing community process.

Sorry this got so long, Doc! As you can see, I'm excited about what
we've accomplished, what we've got planned, and what is possible!

-Eugene

P.S. If you'd like more references, I'd be happy to point you to
specific quotes on our Wiki as well as various blog posts.

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Eugene Eric Kim ......................... http://public.xdi.org/=eekim
Blue Oxen Associates ........................ http://www.blueoxen.org/
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