On Feb 15, 2008, at 2:53 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:53:17 +0200
From: Wolf Bergenheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] GRASS in a usability review
To: Tim Michelsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: GRASS developers list <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
On 13.02.2008 23:57, Tim Michelsen wrote:
Hello GRASS developers,
OpenUsabilty has opened a call for projects to participate the SoC
like
usability review. The deadline is the 20.02.2008.
Since I think that GRASS could really benefit from such a
opportunity I
took the freedom to create a wiki page on this issue:
http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/Usability
What do you think?
Yes! That would be a great opportunity, not to be missed. I think we
should definitely participate. What does that require from us? (In SoC
we needed to assign a Mentor) The user interfaces could use guidelines
from usability experts, to point out things which we might take for
granted, streamlining the UI and maybe something else.
I hope that my thoughts and idea is welcomed and look forward to
discuss
this issue with you.
As I said I think we should use this opportunity as long as we have
the
means. I'm always interested in talking about usability for GRASS.
Hope
we get some more interest then in the past...
In theory, a usability study would be very helpful. But (big caveat),
I worry about results from someone who doesn't understand GIS. This
concern comes from several years of fielding well-meaning suggestions
(often the same ones repeated) from newbys to GRASS about why don't
we have x--when a GIS simply doesn't do x?
GIS doesn't operate like a word processor or spreadsheet. So it's
difficult to evaluate how useable a GIS is unless you know what a GIS
is supposed to do.
Within those parameters, I think a usability study is a good idea. I
remember a year or so ago, a users made a very good suggestion that
we not have menus more than 2 levels deep and that menu item names
should be shorter. This was difficult to do, given GRASS's
complexity. But having done it, I think it helped usability a lot.
Michael
_______________________________________________
grass-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev
