GHOP

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: =============================== 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.

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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).

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