Archive for the ‘research’ Category

Amélie Bonet at Dalton Maag has drawn up redesigns for a number of the Cyrillic and Serbian/Balkans characters that weren’t as clear, or ideal as they could have been. If you use these characters, please help give feedback about whether the suggested improvements are sufficient, or whether they could be improved further. For Greek, there is also a proposed fix to monospace Gamma.

A beta of Ubuntu Font Family Arabic, in print as part of the testing and debugging process for the Arabic coverage.

The magazine is an intriguing tri-lingual production published by the Cultural Office of Saudi Arabia in Germany … German and English articles using Latin script at one cover and Arabic from the other.

Recently we hired an external consultant to compare the usability of 2 email clients: Thunderbird and Evolution. I have taken some highlights from the report to compose this blog. Setting of the usability session The sessions took place in early June at the Canonical Office in London. Thirty participants were recruited. All of them used [...]

First and last impressions of Unity were that it was quite user-friendly, and pleasing in its design and ease of learning. The majority of participants left the session with very positive feelings and were looking forward to Unity’s release so they could download it. In short, participants in this testing session were considerably more positive [...]

 I have just completed sessions of usability testing of Thunderbird. This time, I had the pleasure of working with Andreas Nilsson, who came to London to observe the sessions. It was very useful to get his feedback and to work collaboratively with him on the analysis and implications of the findings. In addition to [...]

’Appropriation’ – the taking of a product and using it for one’s own purposes, in ways unintended by the product creators – is implicitly at the core of the philosophy of opensource, because openness provides for change, adaptation and innovation. Design specifications Last year, I conducted several research projects to understand how developers work and [...]

In preparation for UDS, we conducted usability testing of Unity with general public users.  We are now better informed as to where we should expend further efforts to enhance the experience for users working with Unity. I summarize my findings below. Participants Selection We asked an external recruiting firm to find 15 participants who answered [...]

When conducting and writing up user research findings, I make a point of defining the experience goals alongside participant’s actual real life goals.  This is because, as users interact with a system, they are made to feel a certain way – just as people can, software can bring the best or the worst out of [...]

Abstract Interpreting compiler errors and exception messages is challenging for novice programmers. Presenting examples of how other programmers have corrected similar errors may help novices understand and correct such errors. This paper introduces HelpMeOut, a social recommender system that aids the debugging of error messages by suggesting solutions that peers have applied in the past. [...]