Hello,

Since our last contact we've continued our project, most importantly by carrying out a heuristic evaluation of Inkscape.

Unfortunately the heuristic evaluation didn't turn out as solid results as we had hoped. However we did find out that with the resources available for us and with our current plan, Inkscape is indeed too complex software to test without proper focus on specific parts of it.

As planned, we are going to proceed with usability testing in January. To make sure that the usability testing would turn out useful results, we would like to have some ideas and feedback from you. To point out what kind of things would help us get more useful results for you, here's a few questions:

1. What kind of users should we find for the testing?
2. What tools and functions should the tests be focused on?
3. What kind of tasks should there be?

- Aslak


2010/11/30 Aslak Karsi <aslak.karsi@...400...>
Hello,

What made us think about the bug prioritization as one way of assisting you was the large amount of usability bugs we found marked as wishlist items in the buglist. Thankyou for the link to the bug importance page, I don't think we had found that page yet.

Length of our project is 230 working hours per student, with exception of project leader doing 130 hours. Out of that time we have used about 30-40 hours per student for preparations and familiarizing ourselves with Inkscape.

We've planned schedule for the project so that we could do heuristic evaluation and give you a report of our findings before Christmas. Next year after Christmas holidays have ended we would start planing and doing usability testing. If we go ahead with this plan we've estimated that the final report could be delivered on week 10 or 11 next year.

And again, please do tell us your ideas because the plan can be changed, and it is something we would happily do if you have some specific usability related task for us to do.

- Aslak

2010/11/30 Josh Andler <scislac@...400...>

Hello,

It's nice to hear about your interest in helping to improve the
usability of Inkscape. With your list of ideas, one of the items is a
little tough, and that is the prioritization of usability related
bugs. Our bugs have always been approached as follows:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Bug_management#Bug_importance
. So, almost all usability bugs get prioritized as low. However, we
may be able to figure out a separate system for the usability bugs
that your group works with where we have specific tagging to allow
bending the normal rules. Obviously evaluation and testing is also
greatly welcome.

In terms of suggesting specific areas to test, I say there is enough
of you to really dig in and explore all over the place. :) As a side
question, how long will your project be going on for?

Cheers,
Josh

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Aslak Karsi <aslak.karsi@...400...> wrote:
> Hello
>
> We are a group of five students from Finland, studying at University of
> Oulu, Department of Information Processing Science. We are currently working
> on a project assignment to offer help in usability development for an open
> source software project of our choice.
>
> Past few weeks we have been familiarizing ourselves with Inkscape and its
> community and now we would like to offer our work resources for your use.
>
> We have already figured out a few ideas of what we could do for the Inkscape
> project:
> * Heuristic evaluation
> * Usability testing
> * Prioritization of usability related bugs on the buglist
>
> To produce as useful results as possible, we would like to hear your ideas.
> How do you feel about the tasks suggested? Is there some specific part of
> the software we should focus on? Any ideas and feedback at this point would
> be greatly appreciated.
>
> Project leader Aslak Karsi
> Marko Arffman
> Matias Patosalmi
> Jouni Rissanen
> Matti Siipola
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Increase Visibility of Your 3D Game App & Earn a Chance To Win $500!
> Tap into the largest installed PC base & get more eyes on your game by
> optimizing for Intel(R) Graphics Technology. Get started today with the
> Intel(R) Software Partner Program. Five $500 cash prizes are up for grabs.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/intelisp-dev2dev
> _______________________________________________
> Inkscape-devel mailing list
> Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
>
>