Dear usability expert & F/OSS developer,

We are inviting you to participate in a doctorate study that investigates how developers and HCI experts work in a collaborative project. You will be asked to answer a set of questions regarding F/OSS projects you take part in. Your participation in this survey will provide information that could be used to improve how HCI experts and developers interact in a F/OSS project.

Online survey takes only 15 minutes to complete and will allow us to have an understanding of interaction patterns among project participants.

If you are a F/OSS developer, click here

If you are usability expert, click here .

in order to complete this short survey. Please circulate this email to your friends and contacts so that we can have the widest possible feedback.

Note: demographic inputs of this study will be kept strictly confidential, i.e your name and any other private data will not appear anywhere publicly.

Many thanks for your participation and help!

Those who has a TV at home, probably deploys a set top box of some kind, again probably having a satellite dish, DVB-T tuner or such. It even starts to become messy as you buy one of those D-Smart, Digiturk, DivX player all at one place, scattered around your (already messy) living room.

Now VESTEL is introducing another concept - all-in-one TV which includes a Linux base set top box device. It can connect to internet, letting you read e-mails, watch YouTube videos, login to Flickr, read your e-mails, read USB disks/flash disks and even login to UPNP devices online via wired/wireless network. This is a new, innovative concept when it comes to merging TV and STB, without the hassle to connect yet another device to your TV. 

What is more, all these things run on Linux, and everything you see on the screen from ground up is coded with a bunch of talented coders in Istanbul. The project is becoming a lot entertaining since it introduces new and very challenging issues which need to be solved. 

Those who wish to have a try a demo, just wave to VESTEL booth during Cebit 2007 between 2-7 October, 2007.

Actions for the last two weeks:

• Read: some articles from Open Source Enterprise Magazine and Intel OSS page
• Got happy with wow factor: French education ministry completes migration to Red Hat
  
• Read: "Improbable" by Adam Fawer and "Brain games: Conspiracy theories" by Erol Mütercimler
  
• Seen: Graz, Austria. Subaction: Taken photo, seen the monuments, wandered around and shopped
• Worked on: An embedded Linux project and trusted computing
• Studied: Trusted platform module internals
• Visited: Relatives in Izmir, friends in Eregli (Zonguldak)
• Listened to: Eighties songs from Youtube
• Saddened by: Closing of IT Business Weekly magazin
• Deleted: Too much spam
• Eaten: (Censored)
  

Springer Verlag has published my two papers in its LNCS series for HCI International Conference 2007. I've uploaded the original papers (as they appear in proceedings) in opensource.mit.edu . Links are here (an analysis of involvement of HCI experts in distributed software development: practical issues) and here (out of box issues of free and open source software).

• Back from Beijing, China. Photos updated in Flickr. 
• Spent over 5 hours in 80ler.com (eighties in English). Highly recommended.
  
• I'll be in Graz, Austria between 3-8 September for OPEN TC project. 
• While got 13.5 points over 15 for OPEN INITIATIVE project, we lost the call for 7FP Call 1. Congratulations to UNI MERIT.
  
• Planning a (very) long trip covering Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and New Zealand between October-September.
• Sent an article to ACM Interactions with my advisor. Expecting to see the in special issue of usability in open source software in November-December.
• This is my 60th day without a TV. We broke up :-D
• Still writing my  thesis..

• An Analysis of Involvement of HCI Experts in Distributed Software Development: Practical Issues by Çetin, Verzulli and Frings
• Out of Box Experience Issues of Free and Open Source Software by Göktürk and Çetin

Both papers will published by Springer Verlag. However, I also tried to post the papers to opensource.mit.edu with no luck. Upload mechanism didn't allow me to post the papers, and the maintaners were in vacation.

More news as I return back from Bejing in August.

Daha sonra gelen düzenleme: Bu çalıştayda yapılanlar ve konuşulanlar ilgili olarak Bora Güngören bir web günlüğü girdisi yayınladı 

Özgür ve açık kaynak kodlu yazılımlarla ilgili çalışma yapan yüksek lisans ve doktora öğrencileri Ankara'da toplanıyor. ODTÜ Bilgi İşlem Merkezi'nde düzenlenecek çalıştayda, konu ile ilgilenen kişiler bulgularını sunacak ve diğer araştırmacılarla görüş alış-verişinde bulunacaklar.

Toplantı sonunda, İstanbul'da Ekim-Kasım ayları arasında yapılacak uluslararası bir kolokyum/çalıştay planı üzerine de konuşulacak.

Tarih: 7 Temmuz 2007 Cumartesi
Saat: 13:00
Yer: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi
Bilgi İşlem Merkezi Feza Altınoğlu Salonu

Çalıştay bu alanda araştırma yapan 15 kişi ile sınırlı olacağından katılımcıların önceden isimlerini Altay Özaygen'e (ozaygen _at_ metu.edu.tr) bildirmesi gerekmektedir.

Another interesting shared media server is Flickr, which hosts millions of photos. Just like Youtube, usability community exploits the underlying framework Flickr gives, i.e with discussion threads and annotation pins. Flickr uses clusters (i.e usability, usercentereddesign, ux, interface etc) for categorizing the submissions. This form of grouping lets users see a set of blocks defined under a specific tag.

So why do people need Youtube and Flickr to post their findings, ideas and "hate submissions"? There are several reasons behind that.

• Youtube and flickr provides what current bug reporting systems do (can?) not
• People need different media to submit their bug reporting rationale
• People need to promote usability, user centered design, usability engineering and such parameters, and they don't just want to use blogs with limited feature sets.
• Organizations need to tell their customers that their product is not really awesome and fascinating, but also usable and not feature-bloated.
• Companies try to come up with some visionary comments in their CEO/CTO/CIO blogs. Since "usability sells", what items do you think is well suited for this kind of job? Usability, of course.

So what does Youtube offer? Let's have a look at some interesting links I recently harvested from Youtube lately.

• How eyetracking testing takes place. Some of these posts include the videos hotspot maps generated during the tests.
• A post from usabilitymagazine.com shows how a test subject fails (male, 31 yr old) to find the correct link to redeem his miles.
• Can you show how accessibility of web pages work?
• Cross dimensional gestural interaction techniques
• Special focus: Voting machines
• How can you perform a usability testing?
• A Pardus Linux user gives supplementary information in a bug report

I leave it to the reader to find out videos on how well a product performs in terms of usability (new Microsoft touchscreen product), German usability test video showing a paper prototype (or paper mockup), thinking aloud tests and amateur usability testings.

How about Flickr? I didn't have some time to check all Flickr for interesting posts, however the following can be quite interesting:

• Have fun: World Usability Day Cake
• Show me your poster
• Show the final part work of a paper prototype (Since paper prototyping needs time and re-iteration, it may not be suitable for videos)

While Flickr is A) less overhead, providing a fast response, B) suitable in showing the evident problems on a device C) usually used to show good usability experience, Youtube is A) rich in content (both video and audio), has tendency to show bad usability experiences or usability issues.

Putting some quantitative work in the ideas above, one can start with another research area.