User Observation Hackfest

User Observation Hackfest

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Florida with another bunch of awesome GNOME contributors for the User Observation Hackfest, held together with the openSUSE Summit.

Other people already wrote some reports about the event, whose central part was a day trip to the City of Largo; the administration of the city has one of the biggest public GNOME deployments, with hundreds of users daily doing their work from SUSE-powered thin clients. For me it was a very interesting experience, mostly because I’ve never seen such a big GNOME deployment in reality, and being a developer, I am pretty new to this sort of systematic user testing.

We put together some transcriptions and notes from the interviews we did at Largo, which I now made available on the GNOME Wiki. I look forward for these being useful in improving the pattern language we use to design user interaction in GNOME, and in helping shaping the new HIG people have been working on for a while.

My most sincere thanks go to the sponsors of the event, without which all of this woudldn’t have happened.

By the way, this weekend I’ll attend the GNOME Boston Summit, where we are also hosting a set of sessions specifically for people who want to start contributing to GNOME. See you there if you happen to be in town!