Thursday, 24 and Friday, 25 August 2004: Workshop

In the daily developing practice, usability must "painlessly" integrate into the needs of the developers. The workshop discusses what input at what time in what form is needed- the developers' view. And it discusses what usability input can be given, with what details, argumentation, by whom etc. - the usability view. It all has to do with workflow. Since Open Source development is largely different from commercial programming projects, existing (commercial) usability engineering practices cannot simply be taken over. So how can successful usability integration into the daily work look like?

The workshop therefore shall consist of the following issues (to be refined, expanded):

1. Existing and future resources: How usable/useful are existing styleguides, guidelines, mailing listst etc. when it comes to interface design? When are they used? How do developers know when to consult them and where to look for? How can they be made better, more relevant, more conveniant, more accessible? How should they look like?
2. Exchange: What are the communication interfaces that both developers and usability experts can provide? How can ideas, findings, suggestions, etc.be exchanged? What format must this exchange have? Screenshots? UI-Files? Prototypes? Descriptions? Reports? Where can I find them? Centralised or spread? Do different projects require different input?
3. Contact: How do developers and usability get in contact? How do they know of each other? How can they synchronize their efforts? What is the relationship between them?
4. How can usability be connected to projects, like QA, accessibility or GrokDoc?

We would like to invite all developers (as well as usability experts or newbies) who already do or plan to integrate usability into their projects to participate in this workshop.

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