HCI in Open Source » openusability

OpenUsability & Kuroo at Linuxtag 2006

Florian Grässle — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:56:00 +0000

It’s that time of the year again… Linuxtag! This year Linuxtag will take place in Wiesbaden and not — as in previous years — in Karlsruhe. For me personally Karlsruhe was the better choice since a few old friends live there (hello Gaugi!). Linuxtag has always been the chance to meet them for a little chitchat.

Linuxtag 2006 in Wiesbaden is nevertheless likely to become a special one for me: it will be the location of the first Kuroo developer meeting. Karim is flying over from Stockholm, Bjoern and I are travelling from Berlin. Together we will meet at the OpenUsability booth on Friday and Saturday to talk about where Kuroo is heading and discuss further strategies.

OpenUsability will again be present at Linuxtag 2006. You can find us at booth 4a where we will be happy to inform about usability involvement in open source projects. Apart from that we are going to conduct a live usability test of the still new Kuroo interface. For your reading pleasure we will provide you with some good usability books. They are best enjoyed on our comfortable sofa that will help you take a break from an otherwise busy Linuxtag 2006.

Kuroo – a GUI for gentoo’s portage meets OpenUsability

Florian Grässle — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 11:50:00 +0000

Back then at akademy (remember, remember those hot days in September?) Tina and I gave a talk about personas. Together with the attendees we discussed target user groups for a graphical frontend for portage, gentoo’s package management. A few months earlier Karim Ryde happened to registered at OpenUsability.org, seeking usability advice for his project Kuroo – a KDE frontend for portage. Now put these efforts together, add another usability engineer from OpenUsability, namely Bjoern Balazs, and what do you get? Right, a surprisingly usable GUI for portage.

Based on the findings from the personas talk and the previous kuroo versions Karim, Bjoern and I evaluated use cases and discussed the set of necessary features. Then Bjoern came up with a mockup in Qt Designer which we further refined in various irc sessions. Here’s a very early and outdated mockup screenshot we used as a basis:

The main changes Karim in the end implemented are:

We reduced the number of tabs and replaced them with a QListBox (let’s call it a “icon menu list”). This makes the whole GUI look cleaner and provides the possibility to use the queue icon from the icon menu list as a guide in the package view.

The category tree view was replaced with two lists side by side. This gives us a much better overview over the categories and available subcategories. Believe me, browsing the portage tree has never been easier!

Kuroo now features a powerful filter mechanism. You can filter all packages or preselect a category and subcategory. If you filter all packages, kuroo grayes out the categories that don’t return any hits. The filter line filters as-you-type and notifies you visually if a package matches your query. It’s a filter mechanism that should satisfy both beginners and power users.

The all new package inspector offers easy access to package specific version and use-flag settings. To avoid clutter and information overflow details about each package like changelog, ebuild, dependencies moved there and away from the main window.

The queue view shows progress bars to reflect the status of enqueued packages. You can get a quick overview over which packages are already emerged and how long approximately the remaining ones will take.

Plus the usual “many many more changes”

The old kuroo 0.71 with a lot of tabs at the top and bottom and two tree views (click picture for a larger view):

The brand new kuroo 0.80beta1 featuring the icon menu list and the new category selector (click picture for a larger view):

For more screenshots visit Kuroo at kde-apps.org.

If you are using gentoo and prefer KDE applications, you may want to give the Kuroo 0.80beta1 ebuild a try. Especially the filtering mechanism beats the pants off the emerge shell commands. Stop by at #kuroo on freenode and tell us what you think about the new interface. Feedback and bug reports are highly appreciated

Kpdf usability inspection

Florian Grässle — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:39:00 +0000

I just finished my first usability inspection on Kpdf. It is a really enjoyable PDF Viewer for KDE. Despite of its -compared to that commercial beast acroread- fairly early state of development KPDF is already quite usable. So the issues that were discovered mainly dealt with naming/wording/sorting of menu and toolbar entries. Another problem I found was the similarity of icons. It is difficult to differentiate “Previous Page” from “Back” visually if their toolbar icons look the same.

An old notorious friend crossed my path while going through the various actions: the menubar hiding issue. There must be an easy way to recover the menubar in every view/tool/mouse mode apart from “ctrl+m”. Otherwise users may feel stupid and blame themselves for losing “that thing with the names at the top of the window”. I hope there will be a KDE wide solution for the menubar issue some day, so users can transport the knowledge they gathered from one KDE application to the next.

Now I am looking forward to discussing the findings with the Kpdf developers. It’s a gift from god for openusability engineers to get involved in software development at such an early stage. Usability engineers of commercial products can usually only dream of that