At the beginning of this year, Jon was contacted by someone who was interested in doing user testing on GNOME. This person said that he wanted to promote usability in open source software, and had research experience. His name was Jim Hall.

Fast forward to the present day, and Jim has conducted a set of user tests on GNOME 3.10 and 3.12, which he has analysed and presented to Jakub and me. I have started filing bugs so we can fix the usability issues he discovered. More bug reports are on their way, and we’re pushing to use Jim’s testing data to increase GNOME’s usability for the next release. (Check out the bugs if you’re interested in helping out with this!)

The best thing about working with Jim has been how keen he has been to work us in the GNOME project throughout the research process. We were able to tell him about the kinds of things we were interested in for user testing, were able to give feedback and comments on his test plans, and were able to discuss his results with him shortly after the tests were conducted. This kind of direct access to the research process was fantastic, and ensured that the tests were relevant to our ongoing work.

Jim will be presenting his test results at GUADEC next month.