Projects


How does it work?

Usability Professionals. Browse our project openings! If you are interested to support a certain project, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to get back to us. Once you work on a project, you can document progress and successes in our blog.

FLOSS Projects. If you are a contributor to a FLOSS project and want your project to be listed here, fill in the application form. The OpenUsability team will come back to you to publish a project opening.

Project Openings

 

 

Reduce visual clutter in ArgoUML

About. ArgoUML is a UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams.

Project Page. argouml.tigris.org

Target Audience. Software developers that want to create UML models.
Java developers that want to analyse the structural model of a Java code basis using the reverse engineering functionalities of ArgoUML.
Students in Computer Science or Software Engineering courses that create a plug-in for ArgoUML, being this their course project. There is another scenario os usage which is the use of ArgoUML by students to learn the basics of UML.
DB Administrators that use ArgoUML and its argouml-db sub-project to model a database or reverse engineer an existing database schema to analyse it or to modify it.

Possible Tasks. Some persons state that the UML modelling tools are too cumbersome for modellers to keep the flow. Normally ArgoUML scores high on this by being more simple and lighter, but, I think that we have been adding more buttons and menu options lately, so, maybe the student could help us to identify ways to clean up the screen noise.
Another thing that ArgoUML could make better than other tools is by providing a more powerful keyboard oriented creation of models. Many developers would prefer not to leave the keyboard to create the models - they are used to this on their IDEs and editors. ArgoUML and all the other UML tools make almost mandatory the usage of the mouse for many activities. I think we could become better in this sense and some work was already done which makes it better to use.

 

Evaluate the desktop environment of Bristolwireless OS

About. Bristolwireless is a free Operating System.

Project Page. www.bristolwireless.net

Target Audience. Novice computer users. Users with some experience of the Windows (tm) Operating system.

Possible Tasks. We have adopted the 'slab' menu system and the XFCE desktop environment. It would be great to have some feedback on how XFCE compares to Gnome.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Exploring the Interaction Paradigm for the Game Development Toolset BZK

About. The BZK toolset is a set of tools to help creating games for mobile devices. Graphics are simple but enough to create good games. This suit maybe not be suitable for very intensive games or near-photorealistic graphics.

Project Page. www.sf.net/projects/bzk

Target Audience. Most likely: Game designers creating their next mobile game.
Quite probable: Inventive Gamers looking for a fast way to hack and modify games made for the BZK Vacuum mobile game engine.
Very unlikely: Architects looking for a fast prototyping system.

Possible Tasks. One of the author's main questions is if the BZK toolset should follow the usual trend of a cad application, or if it should try to understand the designer's idea. Currently, the method for designing levels is very "programmer friendly". The goal of this project is to explore if other interaction paradigms would better fit the needs of the target user base.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Overall usability of Edyk

About. Edyuk is an Integrated Development Evironment. It is primarily meant to support C++ language in association with Qt4 framework but can be extended through a powerful and flexible plugin system.

Project Page. edyuk.org

Target Audience. Developers.

Possible Tasks. Finding issues in the current UI design, suggesting improvemnts and possibly ground breaking visual changes to improve the overall usability of the app.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Overall usability for GCstar

About. GCstar is a free sofware for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.

Project Page. www.gcstar.org

Target Audience. Desktop end-users that also could use some productivity software such as office suites.

(Open since April 2008)

 

 

Improve learnability of LDAP Account Manager

About. LDAP Account Manager (LAM) is a webfrontend for managing accounts stored in an LDAP directory.

Project Page. lam.sourceforge.net

Target Audience. Administrators and support staff who do user and group management.

Possible Tasks. We provide several web pages to configure the application. The systems grew over time and got more and more complicated which is sometimes hard for new users.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Evaluate monitor calibration functionality for LPROF

About. LPROF is an ICC profiler with a graphical user interface. It can be used to create ICC version 2 compliant profiles for cameras, scanners and monitors.

Project Page. lprof.sourceforge.net

Target Audience. This software is aimed at users who have a need to produce accurate color and tonality in images. This would include photographers, graphic artists, those that produce documents for publication, printing professionals and color management professionals. Anyone that is doing color critical work or is interested in having color displayed as correctly as possible.
The software is used to produce ICC profiles for various devices including cameras, scanners and monitors. In addition it supports doing monitor calibration.

Possible Tasks. The monitor calibration and profiling functionality is undergoing a major enhancement at this time and one of the projects concerns is to make sure that this new functionality is as user friendly as possible.
Possible tasks would involve evaluating this new functionality and helping to design the UI to support it.
There is currently a rough UI for this but all of the project developers are in agreement that this needs significant usability work.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Designing the e-Press Client Nicepress

About. Nicepress is an e-press client that provides news in a fast and easy manner. It aggregates different news sources and presents them in a desktop applet. The project is on its half way to alpha state.

Project Page. code.google.com/p/nicepress

Target Audience. In its first version, nicepress targets at rather experienced Desktop users.

Possible Tasks.There are mainly planned feautures that require UI design. For the first version, Nicepress is in need of a design to present and manage categories, feeds and articles.

(Open since August 2008)

 

Overall Usability of Pandora Free Monitoring Software

About. Pandora FMS is a monitoring software. It watches your systems and applications, and allows you to know the status of any element of those systems.

Project Page. pandora.sourcefourge.net

Target Audience. Pandora FMS is a set of tools that allows to analyze in a visual way status and performance of several parameters from different Operating Systems, servers, applications and hardware systems, all integrated to an open and distributed architecture.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Various usability improvements for ProjectPier

About. ProjectPier is a free self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through a web interface.

Project Page. www.projectpier.org

Target Audience. ProjectPier is a web-based project management and collaboration software application. It is primarily aimed at end users, who can often spend a large amount of time in the application every day. The application is aimed at non-technical people - though installation needs a semi-technical person to set it up.

Possible Tasks. Possible tasks include:

  • Efficiency/Usability Analysis Report
  • Navigation redesign/Reduce Clicks
  • Improve Information layout on pages
  • Provide intuitive naming of functions/buttons
  • Email interface/commands design

(Open since April 2008)

 

Themeability for savIRC

About. savIRC is an IRC Client.

 

Project Page. www.savirc.com

Target Audience. Users who like to communicate via IRC.

Possible Tasks. Possible tasks include:

  • Make the client themeable by replacing everything possible with tile (tk widgets).
  • Improve the new settings dialog to be usable.

(Open since April 2008)

 

Design help on new features for TuxPaint

About. Tux Paint is a free drawing program for children ages 3 to 12. It combines fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Project Page. www.tuxpaint.org

Target Audience. Tux Paint is a drawing/painting program geared for young children, and suitable for primary-school-level educational use. It's cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS) and translated (to varying degrees) to over 70 languages.

Possible Tasks. Possible tasks include:

  • Application features on the roadmap could use design help (cut/copy/paste tools, improved text-input tool).
  • Documentation is the sore spot.
  • Website would benefit from better design, possibly splitting between home-users, school-users and developers.

(Open since April 2008)

 

How does it work?

Usability Professionals. Browse our project openings! If you are interested to support a certain project, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to get back to us. Once you work on a project, you can document progress and successes in our blog.

FLOSS Projects. If you are a contributor to a FLOSS project and want your project to be listed here, fill in the application form. The OpenUsability team will come back to you to publish a project opening.