My project consisted of building a UI library for the GNOME web ecosystem. GNOME has many websites (gnome.org, extensions.gnome.org, discourse.gnome.org, planet.gnome.org, developer.gnome.org, surveys.gnome.org and many others, but, currently, they don’t have a consistent design between each other. The GNOME UI library then comes with those main following goals:
About two weeks ago I did some research and learned about some libraries to choose one to extend from to use on my GSoC GNOME UI library project, and it turned out to be a very interesting topic that I’d like to share and take the opportunity to talk about how’s the project going, as it’s been a while since I don’t blog :P
This was my last chance to try to be a GSoC student as I am on my last undergrad period. For this summer, I was lucky that GNOME had a web development project, and this project has everything to do with what I am more familiar with. I want to begin thanking my mentors, Claudio Wunder and Caroline Henriksen, who chose me as alumn, I am very grateful for the opportunity to learn more about front end development and to contribute to GNOME, and deeply excited to work on my project.
This year I attended to GUADEC for the first time. It was also my first conference ever, I’ve never been to a FOSS conference or any other kind of conference. Maybe what I have to share about the whole experience is not something new to anyone who attends to conference with some frequency, or maybe it is something they don’t really even notice since they are already used to the whole environment 😛 Anyway, I am hoping my report encourages folks who have never been to GUADEC or other FOSS conferences.
Today is my last day as an Outreachy intern for GNOME. My mentor, Jim Hall, encouraged me to write some topics about the work I developed during the internship and I will add some more that may be useful for readers who may want to apply on next rounds.
For the last round of tests, I tested GNOME’s Text Editor (gedit) design. As I already tested gedit once (you can see the first test plan and results here), I used the same test plan with two additional tasks.
For round 3, I was required to test Gedit’s design after I tested on my first contribution. As I was going to test the same application and compare results, I used the same test plan I used before with two more tasks that Allan asked to include.
For the second round of tests, I tested new designs for Files and Notes GNOME’s programs. I’ve written tasks and scenarios for some important features from both programs I found interesting, but the most important things to be tested that Allan Day required me to test were the programs’ menus.
For this round, Allan Day required me to test some applications, specifically menus. In that way, we chose two applications to test:
For the first round of tests, I tested a new GNOME Sound Settings design. The tasks to be tested were:
In the first round of tests, I will be testing a new design for the sound settings with 7 volunteers. The tasks to be tested are:
As we are expected to write sometimes about our experience during the internship, the Outreachy Organizers suggested us to write about the difficulties we find during our journey (which I find a very interesting theme, because sometimes I feel a bit lost compared to other interns, and being asked share my doubts gives me a clue that I’m not alone at all with those issues).
There are many different ways of testing usability, and this is because every test has a main objective and a context where it is better to be applied on. Deciding on which kind of test you are going to use depends on what do you have of your product and what are you trying to find out about it.
According to this definition, usability is the ease to access and/ or use a program or website. I’d extend this definition to other stuff we see day by day, such as emergency doors, teapots, windows, and so on. We say the more intuitive it is to use something, the better its usability. Usability is important not only to make sure users can actually use our product, but to make sure they like using it and that they’ll keep doing so.
Hello, folks! This post is to introduce you myself and to the work I’ll be developing. My intention is to leave some brief documentation to the ones who want to follow what I’ve been doing and to the ones who want to apply to the next Outreachy rounds, I hope this is useful for you!