On 03.12.2012 10:45, Marco Martin wrote:
On Saturday 01 December 2012, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
Hey everyone,
as most of you probably know, I'm currently working at the Institute of
Ergonomics Darmstadt and I'm part of the usability group there.
Now I had the idea to do a science project with KDE and since Plasma Active
is my "main project" within KDE at the moment, I'd prefer to do something
for PA. Before I think more specifically about what could be an
interesting project, I'd first like to ask if you would like to cooperate
with an academic institution.
We are a group of usability experts and visual/interaction designers, so
things we could do include:
- Doing formal usability testing (including eye tracking) with more than my
usual handful of participants
- Tackling complex UI design problems
- Providing more general research-based guidelines
- Inventing new interaction paradigms
This could be interesting
I see it quite as a long term project (probably not much we could implement
now) but given the timeframe a thing like that will be completed, timing could
be perfect (pa5/pa6 or so i guess)
Absolutely, this would not be something to start - let alone finish -
anytime soon.
What we can't do is code, so we'd have to rely on you to implement things.
Of course we can't force you to implement anything, but if nothing we come
up with gets implemented in the end, this would of course be rather
frustrating ;)
KDE's experience with academia has been rather mixed in the past mostly due
to difficulties in communication/coordination, but since I'm part of both
the core PA team and of the institution, I think we have an opportunity to
make such a collaboration a success for both sides.
one factor i think, is that i remember in the past it was mostly a relation
delivered in the end (at least this happened for an old study adout the web
browser) without any interaction at all during the study. And this tend to
produce stuff not overly useful.
If we could have direct interaction with some of the students involved, would
probably produce way more useful results
Yes, that's what "difficulties in communication/coordination" referred
to ;) I know that just "throwing something over the fence" won't produce
useful results. Plus, the experience for us and our students would be a
lot more interesting if we cooperated more directly.
I'd consider such a project a success for KDE/Plasma Active if:
- we get useful results for PA out of it
- people from our institute found it so interesting that they'd like to
continue working with PA/KDE (we need more UX experts anyway).
The second point would mean a success for our institute as well, the
other criterion for us would of course be publishable results.
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