Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and ID

From: Ellen Reitmayr ellen /at/ openusability point org
Hi,

those of you who participate in the sprint will learn a bit more about
the Season of Usability on Sunday - so far, you may have a look at the
freshly published website!

Cheers,
Ellen

Season of Usability - Usability students get involved with Open Source
First Season of Usability finished successfully!

Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to
encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction
design to get involved with Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS).
During a 3 to 6 month collaboration, students work closely together with
key developers from FLOSS projects to improve the user experience of the
application. The results of the first Season of Usability are now
published on the official website:

http://season.openusability.org

Usability and Open Source (FLOSS) projects can highly benefit from each
other. In the informal setting of a FLOSS project usability specialists
can develop their skills and create show cases for their customers,
while the software gains an optimised user experience. Still there are
little intersections between the two disciplines - few examples include
OpenUsability [2], the FLOSS Usability Sprints [3] and usability groups
of bigger FLOSS projects such as KDE or Gnome. The entry threshold for
usability specialists is high - in FLOSS projects, responsibilities for
user interface design often are not clearly defined, it is hard to get
started.

Season of Usability is an attempt to lower the entry threshold for both
sides and get usability folks into FLOSS development. Students - who
benefit most from practical experience - start their work with a viable
task scope which is developed in agreement with the lead developers.
Students are mentored by an experienced usability specialist, and the
whole team meets regularly. Some universities accept the student project
to gain credits, and it is even possible to write a diploma thesis in
this scope. After successful accomplishment of the task, the students
receive a small gratuity.

The first Season of Usability took place from November 2006 to June
2007. Five applications from different fields of application were
analysed along usability issues, and parts of the user interface were
redesigned. The results were welcomed by the FLOSS developers, and
several students continued their work after the official project period
had ended.

The results of the projects, including screenshots and work material,
are now published on the official Season of Usability website [1].

The next Season of Usability is planned for Spring/Summer 2008. To
participate - either as a student, FLOSS project, usability mentor or
sponsor - get in touch with us:

http://season.openusability.org/contact

Background

Inspired by Google's Summer of Code [4], OpenUsability joined up with
FLOSS Usability, Aspiration [5] and the Open Society Institute [6] to
offer a number of sponsored student projects. Other than the Google
projects that address developers, they aim at students of usability,
user-interface design, and interaction design. Students experience the
interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface
solutions in international software projects while getting into FLOSS
development.

[1] http://season.openusability.org
[2] www.openusability.org
[3] www.flossusability.org
[4] http://code.google.com/soc/2007/
[5] www.aspirationtech.org
[6] www.soros.org