“Part of delivering good desktop experience is making sure the tools and actions are there to make it easier for people to use software,” said Ross Chevalier, Novell Canada’s chief technology officer.“So we want to make available to developers a lot of the information we gathered out of our usability testing in building the first release of Novell Linux desktop and the commercial desktop.”
Dubbed the Better Desktop initiative (betterdesktop.org) the tests — available to anyone for viewing — involved double blind studies of users opening applications and performing functions such as connecting to the Internet and writing and sending e-mail.
“If the tools are hard to use they’re not going to go there,” he said tests — and experience — have shown.
Boon for small ISVs
“There’s an enormous amount value that small, independent developers would not have the resources or the time to get to. Now they can leverage the same data to build their applications and services.”
The first to be posted are videos of these tests and guides for doing usability testing.
Hopefully, he said, the strategy will help the spread of open source applications.
Trying to put a non-partisan spin to the announcement, he also noted that usability lessons are open to all, pointed out that some Linux applications are popular enough to have been ported to Windows or Macintosh platforms.
“This is very telling for the (open source) independent software community because it demonstrates their marketplace is even bigger than it’s been in the past.” Novell may gain an application that it includes in its SUSE Linux distribution, he said.
