CivicActions

Recently, a GHOP student asked me for some help in dealing with usability issues in a drupal contrib module and wanted to know about resources for learning usability. Here I've published my response for others' benefit:

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Hi,

I consider myself a usability student. I'm definitely not a usability expert -- although I have a strong interest in it and I pursue that interest aside from my paid work, mostly through drupal. Anyway, here are my thoughts;

Like many things in life, I think usability is one of those things many people just 'get' naturally. I call this 'usability sense'. It's also possible to 'learn' usability and improve usability sense, knowledge and understanding through practice, literature and other resources.

In this way 'learning usability' is a lot like learning to play music. Many people 'get' music straight away. They learn the tools (their musical instruments) and then they're away.

Google will pay high school kids aged 13 to 18 up to $500 for their participation in their newest endeavour to promote open source in the general public.

Google Highly-Open-Participation Contest is a new programme that follows on from the success of Summer of Code. The first round is a bit of a trial and has only ten projects involved, and Drupal is one of them! The others are;

• Apache Software Foundation
• GNOME
• Joomla!
• MoinMoin
• Mono
• Moodle
• Plone
• Python
• SilverStripe

It is both impressive and interesting how many of them are web-content tools (CMS, web-application frameworks, wikis etc).