12.1 Open source software and the user experience in higher education  (Page 7/8)

In regards to the qualities of open source communities being more or less suited to improving user experience, I will say that my experience will be slanted toward my Sakai and Fluid experience. Using these two projects as a model, I would say that we are uniquely situated to address the user experience because we are embedded with our users, and many of us are users. Therefore, we feel the pain of our own mistakes beyond the market. I think this is also true for many developers of Apache projects or Linux. We are challenged in that many of us haven’t hired the designers we need, leaving us in a situation where we can fix the plumbing but the house is an ugly mess (I say that lovingly). We also have the ability to learn from our mistakes and pool resources in a way that a commercial venture can’t (without acquisitions or ugly patents).

Did this address your questions at all, or was I way off base?

5. ken udas - july 17th, 2007 at 5:50 am

Mara, Thank you for moving this along. I think that you got the spirit of my question. It was a bit ambiguous. I was trying to make a few points and then ask a question. I’ll start with the question first this time.

Do you think that there are characteristics possessed by OSS projects and communities that make those projects better at user driven (at least user informed) design and development?

This question is based on your discussion about a) “Delightful Software,” b) the role that UX plays in a “Delightful Experience,” and c) some of the observations that you highlight about Code Centric-Culture and your reference to UI Designer Rashmi Sinha.

I was suggesting that many university-based online learning groups do not employ application developers and if they use an OSS application they do not apply substantive resource to code development for the project. I recognize that Sakai might be an exception because of its legacy, but as larger numbers of colleges, universities, and other education providers adopt Sakai, I would assume that this will likely become the case if is it is not already. That said, many online learning groups do have educational technologists, learning designers, graphics and multi-media artists/developers, content developers (frequently faculty), project managers, and other professionals involved with identifying, designing, developing, and teaching courses.

Many online learning groups also have a process in which learner experience is captured through evaluation. This is pretty much the case at Penn State World Campus, and was also true at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. In the case of the World Campus we will be developing and revising dozens of courses and delivering&teaching hundreds of courses at any point in time. It would seem to me that the knowledge gathered through the process of designing, developing, authoring, and offering courses, could be well leveraged by an OSS community to enhance UI/UX, which points back to my question. What can OSS projects and communities do to capture this knowledge from application users who will not directly contribute code to a project? This is based on the assumption that the type of knowledge that could be captured and generated through design, development and teaching processes would be useful to user interface design and supporting improved user experience.