Open Source Projects and Usability Professionals?

accountant asks: "A very close friend of mine is a qualified usability tester. She gained her Master's Degree last September and now has a good job with a mega corporation. Unfortunately, times being what they are that mega corporation is looking at a mega merger and mega job cuts. It's tough finding jobs in usability at the moment (a lot of companies haven't grasped the concept of usability, nor usability specialists, and a lot of dot coms have no cash to take on more staff). It's especially tough if you have less than one year of experience. Usability, especially on the desk top, is a major priority for Open Sourced environments like KDE and Gnome. Who's doing the testing in such Open Source environments? Are they doing sizeable studies, running focus groups and doing statistical analysis on user test results? Money is handy, of course, but there must be opportunities to feed a resume and help the Open Source community. Your thoughts and URLs please?"

Comments

No, but they should

[selectspec]

Usability testing tends to be primarily focused on GUI desktop applications. Right there you pretty much nix most open src projects. However, there are quite a few open source desktop apps. Mozilla for example doesn't do any formal usability testing, although the a good majority of the bugs submitted are "enhancements" of the usability nature. I'd imagine that during Star Office's proprietary days under Sun and StarDivision, that some sort of usability testing was performed. However, I doubt that any is currently happening for Open Office. The problem is that focus groups and usability tests cost money. I wonder if groups like Ximian are doing this sort of thing?