The Summer 2007 issue of interfaces contains an article on our User Experience Project. If you are not a member of the British HCI group, you can read “User Experience for OpenOffice.org” on my website.
Quote:
The first rule of open source development is also the reason for an inherent usability problem: "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."
The result is a self-referential system – developers develop for themselves rather than for the average user or the target audience. Usability engineering is considered as superfluous extra. However, to provide a good user experience, it is the user's itch that needs to be scratched.
This article presents user experience activities in the context of OpenOffice.org. The author – co-lead of the User Experience Project – will discuss the status of building an open source community of usability professionals to improve the usefulness and usability of the application.
