Hi there -- I don't post much here, but I was the programmer on the
Multimedia Usability Project, which primarily focused on making uploads
easier. The outside funding for that project just ended, so I think it's
a good time to talk about what (if anything) we will do in the future
along these lines.
Going forward, we ought not to think about usability as the
responsibility a few people in San Francisco. I have been asking myself
how we could end the need for usability projects, and instead make that
part of everyone's practices.
What makes you a usability engineer? My personal belief is that it isn't
(primarily) a matter of having special knowledge.
You become a usability software engineer when you see five average users
utterly fail to accomplish the task you wanted them to be able to
accomplish.
Programming is a hubristic enterprise, but for UI, these negative
feelings are essential: watching ordinary users get angry and frustrated
dealing with what you've created, even feeling a certain shame and
embarassment that you got it so wrong. Only then do you see how large
the conceptual gap is between you and the average user -- but you also
usually come out of the experience with an immediate understanding of
how to fix things.
So is there a way to have *everybody* who develops software for end
users in our community have that experience? Maybe.
At the WMF, for these Usability Projects, we had to do formal studies
with expert consultants, because these were grant-funded projects and we
needed to present scientific data. Doing those studies is expensive and
time-consuming.
But as a developer, it was more valuable to do "hallway usability
testing" in an informal way. There are lots of startups these days that
try to deliver such lightweight user testing over the web; could we do
the same? Or, possibly we don't even need software; maybe what we need
is a tradition of doing this for everything we release.
So how about that? If there were an easy way to integrate usability
testing into your process as a developer, would you be interested? And
what should that look like?
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar ( <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>