Home
Görkem Çetin
Collaborative media servers helping usability awareness [English only]
Monday, 18 June 2007
Youtube is a useful tool which provides a means of discussing the posted videos online. Usability world has started benefitting from Youtube, because there's no such freely available tool exists to track usability bugs. Said that, the usage patterns of Youtube differs from each other and aims are distinct. As a video broadcasting service, this tool can be the next collaborative media usability people are looking for.

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.

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:

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.

 
Claros inTouch v2 is here
Wednesday, 06 June 2007
Long awaited Java based Ajax enabled communications suite Claros inTouch 2.0 is finally ready. It took more than 3 months to fix bugs since 2.0 beta, however UI quality, intuitiveness and future development promises deserve a download and try. For those who wish to install Claros inTouch: just wave here.
 
Guestbook page fixed
Monday, 28 May 2007
An issue keeping guests leave their messages to the guestbook component was fixed. For those who wish to send their request, anger, wish or fish can do so now.
 
At sinconf 2007
Wednesday, 09 May 2007
As Trusted Systems Labs, a group in UEKAE, we have a nice booth in Sinconf 2007 held in Gazi Magosa, Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. The first day, conference attracted 100+ visitors and lots of OPEN TC leaflets have been distributed - nice news.

Everything was smooth except the rain, which is unbearable when your hotel room is 20 meters away from the Mediterranean.

 
First Pardus book published
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
The first Pardus book is published by Seckin Publishing. It features an easy-to-read content for beginners mentioning multimedia, office applications, internet connection and other Pardus technologies. Book also includes a Pardus 2007.1 CD.

Author: Görkem Çetin
First edition: April 2007
ISBN: 978-975-02-0484-54
Publisher: Seckin Publishing
Price: 13,90 YTL
Number of pages: 243

 
tOSSad project has successfully ended
Monday, 02 April 2007
tOSSad project, which has started two years ago has published its final reports to the public. This project was funded by the European Commission under its IST Priority of the 6th Framework Programme.

Complete collection of 15 documents, comprising over 600 pages, sheds light on the general economic and social benefits of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). The reports propose ways to overcome national barriers of F/OSS adoption, discuss how to improve the usability of F/OSS in a distrubuted project development environment, outlin a F/OSS curriculum for educational purposes and offer hands-on tips on setting up a Linux laboratory for schools.

tOSSad project, led by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, now tries to disseminate its results throughout various media to help leverage the F/OSS ecosystem in European countries. All tOSSad reports are available for download from www.tossad.org/publications. A readers guide provides a brief summary of the most important reports.

 
Open Source Resource Center "Resources"
Tuesday, 20 March 2007
"This open source training toolkit has been developed by the Open Source Resource Center (OSRC). Used as the basis for OSRC's training workshops, it contains step-by-step manuals related to open source applications for databases, application servers, desktop applications, office productivity suites, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and open source desktop applications for the Microsoft Windows platform. A set of CDs, including two Linux distributions and other applications, forms an integral part of this open source training toolkit."

To see what Pakistani Linux gurus are up to, see here. Sorry for direct copying.

Enjoy.

 
Filiz has passed from Qual
Thursday, 01 March 2007
Filiz has also passed from qual exam, leaving with lots of thesis ideas (to be eliminated wildly in the upcoming weeks). Congrats to my wife, as she has shown a reputable success up to now.

I'll be in Bilgi University for Open Days Organization between 3-4 March, and then in Ankara for a workshop about information security (5-6 March). Meanwhile, my friend Lorenzo Pallara, who is working in CINECA (Italy) about set top boxes and embedded Linux for a long time, is visiting Istanbul. As opposed to my visitigin him Bologna, this time I'll take them to a good Bosphorus restaurant, having some RAKI and BALIK (yum!).

 
Qual exam: One more barrier left behind
Monday, 22 January 2007
After 11 hours of written examination scattered in two days plus a stressing oral examination, I finally managed to pass from qual exam. It's time to work on the doctoral thesis immediately, and finish this new, challenging task in one year. Hurray!
 
A Fullbruary month
Friday, 12 January 2007
I'll be here and there in February. Let's see where and why.
 
Linux administrators and project managers wanted
Thursday, 04 January 2007
I've received two open positions last week:

  • Project manager, with knowledge in Linux systems (Ankara)
  • Linux system administrator (Istanbul)

Please send your CV to me (gorkem _at_ gorkemcetin.com) for further info.

 
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>

Results 49 - 60 of 116