Publications

The tOSSad project has held the “F/OSS Usability Workshop” in CINECA, Italy on December 15, 2007. The theme of the workshop was “Empowering F/OSS applications with a usability focus: designing for a successful project”. The participation was free of charge, to increase visibility and number of attendees.

The usability work package of tOSSad aims at tackling the main usability obstacles in F/OSS and leading to a breakthrough of usability in F/OSS by assuring that usability will be paid more attention in F/OSS in the future. Following up on this objective a usability workshop with participation of the usability experts within the project was initialized. For the preparation of the workshop a short survey among the participants was conducted. The main reason for performing this survey was to ascertain the relevance and the level of sophistication of F/OSS and the experiences of the tOSSad WP 3 participants.

This report gives an overview of F/OSS usability projects and initiatives and includes the results of the usability survey conducted in the last months. The survey covered questions on OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Linux. Thanks to all respondents for participating!

In order to improve the state of F/OSS mobile applications, we need to identify the current problems. We have gathered three groups of data, in which we outline the problems, solutions to the problem and correlation of the problem to the target group. First, we correlate usability and F/OSS with mobile devices, then usability and mobile devices with F/OSS and finally F/OSS and mobile devices with usability. Related findings can be used to provide Q/A (questions and answers) type of guidelines to interested developers.

We conclude the report with requirements and best usability practices that should be followed in order to improve the quality of mobile applications. These requirements are complemented with an overview of the current state-of-the-art in combination with Web 2.0 and "push technology".