Bringing user-centered design to open source software development

Bringing user-centered design to open source software development Methods: Deciding What to Design 17-652/752 -- guest lecture -- Claudia Müller-Birn, CMU SCS ISR, 11-18-2009

Outline ๏ Motivation ๏ Usability & FOSS - a challenging relationship ๏ Usability feedback is hard ๏ HCI know-how is rare ๏ Usability is difﬁcult to measure ๏ Case study: SONIVIS ๏ Research challenges

(Nielsen, 1993) Five characteristics of usability ๏ Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design? ๏ Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks? ๏ Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency? ๏ Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors? ๏ Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

FOSS projects and usability ๏ In free/open source software (FOSS) development projects contributors from around the globe collaborate, mostly on a voluntary basis, to create publicly available software applications ๏ Collaboration and communication in these projects is computer- mediated ๏ Nature of development activities in FOSS communities greatly inﬂuences the usability of the software applications being developed

FOSS projects and usability (cont.) ๏ Work is organized around implementing discrete functions and features rather than creating a comprehensive design (Nichols & Twidale 2003) ๏ More and more users without deep technical knowledge, but with higher quality expectations (Hedberg et al. 2007) ๏ Practice of “release early, release often” can cause poor design ๏ User needs are typically not considered during the design and development process ๏ In terms of usability, there is a clear divide between the small OSS projects and large project with company support (Benson 2004 et al.)

Usability feedback is hard ๏ Text-centric tools hinder discussions about interaction design (Twidale & Nichols 2005) ๏ Difﬁculties in reporting usability problems (Nichols & Twidale 2006) ๏ “Closed” discussions about usability issues in developer mailing lists or IRC

(Nichols & Twidale 2006) Reporting usability problems ๏ Bug tracking systems are often complex with a less intuitive interface ๏ Difﬁcult to handle for non-technical users ๏ Even screen shots might be insufﬁcient to describe the usability problem ๏ Sometimes problems occur after a sequence of activities ๏ Possible solutions can be better explained by using mock-ups or simple sketches

One solution: Hendrix ๏ Feedback-collecting mechanism for mozilla.org ๏ Lower the barrier to giving feedback ๏ Designed for quick comments

Another solution: Design-by-Blog Wordle from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

(Nichols & Twidale 2006) Design-by-Blog ๏ Distributed design approach New Alarm Dialog ๏ Blogs are supplements to Worked on creating a mock-up for a re-design of the alarm notification Bugzilla-like systems dialog in Evolution today, and after a few revisions, Ben and I agreed on the image below. I'm working on the ๏ Blog entry contains code to get this implemented and into CVS, so it should be popping up on your desktop soon. - Problem description - Design goals - Contraints or design criteria - Screenshot ๏ Example: Groupware Client Evolution

(Nichols & Twidale 2006) Design-by-Blog (cont.) ...thank god New Alarm Dialog Again someone is finally doing something about After my previous blog entry about the the alarm dialog Alarm dialog mock-up, a lot of feedback was had, and I went off to implement a version. What I currently have implemented is in the screenshot below. If anyone knows a What happens when I standard localizable way to put the time/ have more than one date information into a single line, reminder? Will I have please, e- mail me. This version has the multiple dialogs ...? times as currently displayed by Evolution, as well as the appointment summary in bold, instead of just an "Appointment" label, and single-click snoozing. I still feel that the basic Gnome alarm+calendar functionality shouldn't depend on a whole email app...

(Nichols & Twidale 2006) Design-by-Blog (cont.) New Alarm Dialog in CVS I don't seem to understand when the Finally, the new alarm dialog is in CVS. A alarm is set to go screenshot of what was committed is below. off The icon was moved to the left side, and the secondary text/widgets were re-aligned to match the HIG [Human Interface Guideline] 2.0 Alert specs more precisely. This cleans up the code quite a bit and In Gnome, gets rid of the HTML widget that we were icons usually go on using before. the left side of alert windows... I do agree with the comment above though that said the title and time should be larger

(Nichols & Twidale 2006) Outcome of Design-by-Blog ๏ Incremental redesign of something that has already been developed ๏ No formal requirements, scenarios or anything similar ๏ Design is more public and accessible ๏ No registration process required ๏ Can be seen as HCI variant of code inspection ๏ Difﬁculties for users to post graphics as well ๏ Complexity increases with the increasing number of posts

HCI know-how is rare ๏ Developers have a software development background, and they are highly technically focused (Benson 2004 et al.) ๏ HCI specialists are seldom involved and efforts to consider usability processes are only rarely undertaken (Nichols & Twidale 2006) ๏ Usability specialists are employed by free software vendors such as Sun and skilled volunteer designers are even harder to find (Thomas 2008), therefore supported projects adopting more likely techniques from HCI mainstream (Nichols & Twidale 2006) http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobysimkin/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/as737700/

The GNOME usability project ๏ Since August 2000 Sun has contributed usability resources to GNOME ๏ Usability study of GNOME 1.2 was ﬁrst major input ๏ GNOME usability project (GUP) was formed ๏ Sun’s staff responsible for GNOME human interface guidelines http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject

GNOME human interface guidelines ๏ Help to design and write applications that are easy to use and consistent with the GNOME desktop ๏ Working with maintainers to ﬁnd existing interaction problems through user testing and surveys ๏ Visual design and interaction engineering of new desktop components http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/index.html.en

(Benson 2004 et al.) Challenges of GNOME Usability Project ๏ Usability mailing lists and IRC channels are available but there are few useful discussions ๏ GUP is less as a usability “consultancy” for developers and more as a group of individuals who comment on usability bugs ๏ Usability assistance is usually only sought after interfaces have been “designed” ๏ There is no shared or documented vision of GNOME’S target audience ๏ Some developers feel that “Sun will ﬁx that, so we don’t need to bother”

KDE usability project ๏ Educating developers about usability practices ๏ Conducting usability activities to help gather feedback from users ๏ Working with projects and help design usable user interfaces ๏ 2005-07 over 20 reports on usability ๏ Deﬁning human interface guidelines ๏ Providing user research proﬁles http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability

KDE user research proﬁle ๏ Purpose - Provide a place to document an application's user research information for reference during development - Top level items are information everyone in the project should be aware of ๏ Top level items - Who is the application for? - What kinds of tasks will they complete? - What are the environment conditions and requirements? ๏ Based on Persona concept

What is a Persona? ๏ User model that formalizes the design of software for speciﬁc archetypes of individuals (Cooper 1999) ๏ All necessary data are derived from interviews and observations of users and potential users ๏ Possible process (Cooper at al. 2007) 1. Identify behavior patterns 2. Derive goals that are directly related to the software being designed 3. Verify the completeness and the redundancies in personas 4. Prioritizing all personas in order to determine most important persona

What does a Persona look like? ๏ Persona typically includes a ﬁctional name and characteristics that are consistent with one of the main identiﬁed user groups ๏ Example: http://www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html

Usability is difﬁcult to measure ๏ It is harder to measure whether the software is useful, how responsive it feels, whether it behaves as people expect then measures such as technical correctness (Thomas 2008) ๏ To measure human-related qualities in user tests is difﬁcult because the community is distributed ➡ Weak incentives for usability (Thomas 2008)

Another way to evaluate usability: ingimp ๏ Invented by HCI research group at the University of Waterloo ๏ Standalone version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) that collects real-time usability data ๏ Three types of information: command use, document characteristics, and interaction data ๏ Possible questions: - When it is used during the day and how frequently? - What commands people use and which commands are most frequently undone? http://www.ingimp.org/

Case study SONIVIS: Bringing user-centered design to FOSS development

SONIVIS - small-sized FOSS project ๏ Development “starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch” (Raymond 2001) ๏ Need for a tool to analyze and visualize virtual communities in Wikis ๏ Initiated in December 2005 as small university project with three persons; today the team is comprised of nine volunteers ๏ First free software release May 2008 ๏ Second release soon after tremendous re-engineering of the back- end http://sonivis.org/

Basic Idea

Basic idea: collaboration network Name: Bryan Derk First Change: 2004-12-02 Created Articles: 23 Article Changed: 3,565 Amount contribution: 45,923 Degree: 173 Degree Centrality: 0.96

Basic idea: Wiki-link network Article Name: World Wide Web Created: 2001-12-07 Number of Different Authors: 1,450 Number of Changes: 11,430 Size: 45.345 characters Number of Wiki Links: 15 Number of Internet Links: 23 Page Rank: 0.8

From the ﬁrst idea to the ﬁrst release ๏ Focus was on the development of application functionality ๏ Extending Eclipse RCP by using existing functions ๏ Integrating available FLOSS software - GNU R (statistics software) for network analysis and text mining measures - Prefuse for network visualization ๏ Interface was divided into two viewing modes - Analysis Perspective for overview and detailed automatic analysis with statistics techniques - Manipulation Perspective for visual data exploration http://www.eclipse.org/ http://www.r-project.org/ http://prefuse.org/

Community infrastructure ๏ Website: information medium ๏ Forum: user questions ๏ Wiki: project dokumentation and manuals ๏ Different mailing lists - Developer list (coordination of development work) - Announce list (general information) ๏ Skype: weekly meetings ๏ Codebeamer: bug- and issue tracking system ๏ SVN: source code management system ๏ Sourceforge: raise visibility

Number of external users http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sreejithk2000/

GUI: Analysis Perspective

GUI: Manipulation Perspective

Hmm...what can I do?

(Tidwell 2005) Interaction design patterns ๏ Originated as an architectural concept by Christopher Alexander ๏ Deﬁne optimal solutions to common usability problems in a speciﬁc context ๏ Various libraries available ๏ General Structure - What... - Use when... - Why... - How... http://designinginterfaces.com/

Example: Card stack ๏ What: Put sections of content onto separate panels or "cards" ๏ Use when: There's too much material on the page ๏ Why: Content is now understandable at a glance; most common form of Card Stack are very familiar to users ๏ How: Split up the content into coherent chunks, and give them short, memorable titles (one or two words, if possible)

Reviewed patterns Category Design pattern Application Center Stage X Interface Layout Card Stack Movable panels X Prominent “done” button Actions and commands Progress indicator Cancelability Sortable table Showing complex data Jump to item X Input hints Forms and controls Autocompletion

Hmmm...what else?

Paper prototyping for improving the interface ๏ Method to collect ideas, sketch, design, test and communicate ๏ Deﬁnition of relevant tasks ๏ Tests are carried out with real users = SONIVIS developers ๏ Interaction is based on paper and click is similar to real world ๏ Persons “plays” computer

Result of paper prototyping This is the first time I’ve seen these functions. Wow! Ah, now I understand how SONIVIS works...

Sketches of new graphical user interface SONIVIS File Data Mining Search Window Help Interaction Nework Context Network Global Settings Display Settings Network Node Filter Export Metric Value Betweenness Centrality 0,2542 Closeness Centrality 0,2364 Degree Centrality 0,0694 Average Degree 3 Density 0,6984 Node Count 123 Edge Count 1234 2001 2002 2003 Start Date 02.03.2002 End Date 15.06.2002

New wizards Global Settings Node Filter Please select the namespace you want to visualize. Edge Filter Namespace Main Metrics Time Settings Please select the category/tags you want to visualize. Category/ Tags Please select the articles or ressources you want to visualize. Elements Cancel Done Network Preferences Visualization Algorithm Please choose a metric and adapt the size and the mapping scale of the nodes if requried. Node Visualization Node Size Edge Visualization Visual Filtering Mapping Scale Please choose a metric and adapt the color and the mapping scale of the nodes if requried. Node Color Mapping Scale Done Cancel

Deﬁned key SONIVIS Persona Richard M. Watkins 27 years PhD student at the Department of Computer Science at a middle-sized university Research in Social Computing, especially evolution of virtual communities BA Social Science, M.S. in Computer Science He is in the middle of his Phd thesis, has already defined his main area of interest and his general research questions. Richard has different data sets from different virtual communities. He is mainly interested to explore these datasets in terms of their existing network structure and topics. For this he is looking for a tool that should allow him to import his data sets easily but at the same time that allows him to extend, if necessary, existing measures and visualizations without a huge programming effort. Key attribute - Has limited programming experiences, need for "ready-to-go" tool - Has no operating system preferences - Appreciates using FLOSS rather then closed software - Wants high level of interactivity

Outcome...

Recent graphical user interface Realized design patterns: ½

Realized “half pattern”: Sortable Table

Deﬁned key SONIVIS Persona Richard M. Watkins 27 years PhD student at the Department of Computer Science at a middle-sized university Research in Social Computing, especially evolution of virtual communities Responses of developers: Science BA Social Science, M.S. in Computer 0 He is in the middle of his Phd thesis, has already defined his main area of interest and his general research questions. Richard has different data sets from different virtual communities. He is mainly interested to explore these datasets in terms of their existing network structure and topics. For this he is looking for a tool that should allow him to import his data sets easily but at the same time that allows him to extend, if necessary, existing measures and visualizations without a huge programming effort. Key attribute - Has limited programming experiences, need for "ready-to-go" tool - Has no operating system preferences - Appreciates using FLOSS rather then closed software - Wants high level of interactivity

Growing number of usability documents Active persons: Usability design area 1

Recent approaches ๏ Attracting usability expert as new team member ๏ Deﬁning an integrated development-usability process ๏ Rule: “Don’t touch the GUI before talking to a usability person or having a look at our guidelines.” ๏ Using Balsamiq to create our mockups

Research challenges

Recent challenges ๏ Need for methods or tools for distributed usability design (Sinha 2005) ๏ Especially lightweight remote online usability testing methods ๏ Imitating design of proprietary software might repeat mistakes, therefore FOSS can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives (Thomas 2008)

Thank you for your attention. Questions?

References ๏ Benson, C. & Muller-Prove, M. & Mzourek, J. (2004) Professional usability in open source projects: GNOME, OpenOfﬁce.org, NetBeans. In: CHI '04: CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1083 - 1084. ๏ Cooper, A. (1999) The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Indianapolis, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. ๏ Cooper, A., Reimann, R. & Cronin, D. (2007) About Face 3.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis, Wiley & Sons. ๏ Hedberg, H., Iivari, N., Rajanen, M. & Harjumaa, L. (2007) Assuring Quality and Usability in Open Source Software Development. International Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLFOSS Research and Development. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2007. ๏ Nichols, David M. & Twidale, Michael B.: Usability processes in open source projects. Software Process: Improvement and Practice. 11/2, 2006, 149-162. ๏ Nichols, D. M. & Twidale, M.B. (2003) The Usability of Open Source Software. First Monday. 1(8), 2003. ๏ Nielsen, J. (1993) Usability engineering. Boston, MA.

References (cont.) ๏ Raskin, J. (2000) The Humane Interface. New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. Amster- dam, Addison-Wesley Longman. ๏ Raymond, E. S. (2001) The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Sebastopol, O'Reilly. ๏ Sinha, R. (2005) URL: http://rashmisinha.com/2005/04/03/open-source-usability-the-birth-of-a- movement/ ๏ SONIVIS (2009) SONIVIS: Social networks in virtual information spaces. http://www.sonivis.org ๏ Thomas, M.P. (2008) URL: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability ๏ Tidwell, J. (2005) Designing Interfaces. Sebastopol, O'Reilly Media. ๏ Twidale, M.B. & Nichols, D.M. (2005) Exploring Usability Discussions in Open Source Development. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

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Bringing user-centered design to open source software development

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