mzourek.org

So it’s official! We have transfered our local chapter of ACM SIGCHI to an official non-profit organization, registered by the local government. It’ll allow us to have own budget (don’t rely just on sponsors and to have membership fees) and also to expand our activities: build our own library (there are almost no books about HCI available in the Czech Republic) and conduct trainings. Looking forward to it! And, BTW, we have a new website!

Prague ACM SIGCHI organizes local World Usability Day again! This one is aligned with the global one, so it’s focused on transportation. More information (in Czech) and registration is on: http://praguewud2008.eventbrite.com/

This post is a copy from Design at Sun blog.

Jiri Mzourek is a senior manager in xDesign, responsible for Sun Developer Products and SOA/BI. In his spare time, he evangelizes usability in the Czech Republic by organizing SIGCHI meetings, World Usability Day, and working closely with the Czech Technical University on usability and accessibility related projects.

Exciting news!!!

Have you ever dreamed of developing an accessible Swing GUI the easy way? Stop dreaming and checkout the new NetBeans a11y plugin!

Let’s start from the beginning:

The xDesign team in Prague has a long history of cooperation with our local Czech Technical University in Prague, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. For example, together we built the first usability lab in our region, organized a local World Usability Day, and ran Czech SIGCHI. The last 12 months we also cooperated on the a11y plugin for NetBeans. The main goal for this plugin was to allow Java developers without any special knowledge of accessibility to develop accessible Swing GUIs in NetBeans.

After a year we are proud to announce the availability of version 1.0 (for NetBeans 6.0 and 6.1)!

How you can use it:

1) If you don’t have it already, get NetBeans 6.0 or 6.1 from www.netbeans.org.

2) Download the a11y plugin from a11y.netbeans.org , or use the AutoUpdate (Beta) functionality built into NetBeans. If you downloaded it manually, once you’re running NetBeans, from the pull-down menus go to Tools -> Plugins, select the "Downloaded" tab, and click on the "Add Plugins" button; then browse your disk for the downloaded plugin (nbm file) and select it.

3) Now, start the NetBeans GUI Builder (for example add a new JFrame file into an existing Java project.)

4) Go to the Window menu and select "A11Y Result Window". That’s it!

Now, when you edit the GUI it will automatically be checked for accessibility. The findings will be sorted into 3 categories (Errors, Warnings and Infos), which will be described and also will have a suggestions on how to fix them. By double clicking on the findings, you accept the suggested fix (for example, double clicking a "Name" error would add an appropriate accessible name). More details (for example checking of tab-traversal) is described in the documentation.

Enjoy!

Many thanks from all of us to the Sun External Research Office for their financial support, Tomas Pavek (NetBeans engineering manager) for technical support, Max Sauer and Martin Novak – who wore two hats during the process (Sun QE and CTU students) and for their contributions and cooperation with all of the other CTU students.

This post is a copy from Design at Sun blog.

Jiri Mzourek is a senior manager in xDesign, responsible for Sun Developer Products and SOA/BI. In his spare time, he evangelizes usability in the Czech Republic by organizing SIGCHI meetings, World Usability Day, and working closely with the Czech Technical University on usability and accessibility related projects.

When Sun’s Prague office became too small, we all moved to a new building. So during the space planning, we made sure that we got a room there for a usability lab. Why build a second lab? The main reason was to have it in the same place as the engineering team so they could easily attend the test sessions.

This time, we decided to do everything on our own: one of our interaction designers, Rudolf Bock, selected the equipment. Based on our experience with the labs at CTU and at Sun in Silicon Valley, we created blueprints and made sure to have a big one-way mirror. From our experience, despite the fact that some participants feel less comfortable in this set-up, it makes a difference to observers — they feel more connected to the participants.

We got the space with a one-way mirror in the Summer of 2006! Here are pictures of what we have now:

The lab is fully digital, again partially based on Morae. The equipment is:

• 2x Dome camera Panasonic WV-CS570
• 1x Panasonic WV-CU360CJ
• 1x Data multiplex unit Panasonic WJ-MP204C
• 1x Blackmagic Design DeckLink Multibridge Extreme PCIe

The first usability study was conducted in this lab in November 2006. Since then, we have used this new lab for the majority of our studies. We also plan to show it to the public as part of World Usability Day 2007. Stay tuned!

This post is a copy from Design at Sun blog.

Jiri Mzourek is a senior manager in xDesign, responsible for Sun Developer Products and SOA/BI. In his spare time, he evangelizes usability in the Czech Republic by organizing SIGCHI meetings, World Usability Day, and working closely with the Czech Technical University on usability and accessibility related projects.

In 2004, our xDesign team in Prague was facing a problem: the number of usability studies we needed to do in Prague kept growing and growing. Since we had no usability lab, we did all of our testing in two meeting rooms that the rest of the company also used. One served as observation room and the second one as testing room. It worked … but there were two main issues. We had to “build” the lab every time from scratch, and it took about a day to run wires, set up the computer and camera equipment, and move furniture. The second, even bigger, problem was not having enough space. Sun had started its expansion in Prague, so we were hiring a lot of new people, and the building was very crowded. It became harder and harder to find two meeting rooms that were next to each other and available for a couple of days. And it was impossible to build a lab in the building: there was no space for it!

So I started a discussion with the Department of Computer Science at Czech Technical University. Our history of cooperation had started earlier, in 2003, when I was networking with other interaction designers in the Czech Republic. I found out that the person in charge of Czech SIGCHI was my former professor, Prof. Pavel Slavik. So I contacted him, and we quickly found that both Sun and CTU were interested in cooperating in the field of usability. But that’s a different story, which deserves its own post.

Then in 2004, we discussed usability labs, reached an agreement and made a deal: Sun would supply the equipment and know-how, and CTU would supply the space and construction. Both institutions would share the facility, and, after three years, CTU would keep all usage rights and equipment. To construct the lab, we worked closely with the manager of Sun’s U.S. usability labs at the time, J.O. Bugental, and we outsourced the equipment and configuration work to a vendor.

The lab was designed and built to contain both standard analog technology (a scan converter and DVD burner) as well as fully digital technology, which is currently mostly running on Morae. There is no one-way mirror — we observe the tests using monitors and video cameras.

The lab officially opened on November 15, 2004, and the Czech Minister of IT, Vladimir Mlynar, attended. It was the first usability lab in the Czech Republic and, most likely, in all of Eastern Europe!

After the lab opening, we also supplied the promised know-how in two ways. First, we arranged for an external company, Relevantive, to provide a four-day training for teachers and Ph.D. students, which covered usability basics including usability evaluation. Second, we cooperated on ongoing projects, coaching and mentoring students as well as teachers.

Since 2005, CTU added usability to its standard curriculum and became the Czech Republic’s leading university in this field. Hundreds of students have access to the lab every year and use it to run their accessibility and mobile device projects.

So this is the story of the first lab. I will talk about the second lab in a later post.

This post is a copy from Design at Sun blog.

Jiri Mzourek is a senior manager in xDesign, responsible for Sun Developer Products and SOA/BI. In his spare time, he evangelizes usability in the Czech Republic by organizing SIGCHI meetings, World Usability Day, and working closely with the Czech Technical University on usability and accessibility related projects.

In May of 2006 Jan Rojcek began a redesign of the netbeans.org web site based on the results of some out-of-the-box usability tests that we’d conducted. You can find one example of the test on our opensource website ui.netbeans.org.

The main issues were:

The design didn’t work well for a new visitor (potential user) To see a NetBeans screenshot, a visitor had to select the correct link from the 42 available links on the home page, and 38 links on NetBeans product page A visitor had the same problem (choosing the right link from 42 or 38) when trying to get to a comprehensive feature description There were 4 pages describing what NetBeans was (First time here?, IDE, Switch, About) Download took at least 3 well-aimed clicks

With this (scary) list of issues, Jano got a “go” to go ahead with the redesign.

He worked with the stakeholders (NetBeans engineering, marketing and webteam) to agree on the main goals of the redesign:

• New visitor (potential user – not currently using NetBeans) is our primary target
• Make the basics clear
  • “What is it NetBeans?”
  • “How much does it cost?”
  • “What is so good about it?”
  • “Why should I start to use it?”
• Make download straightforward
• Make NetBeans.org more attractive

The redesign was focused on the homepage, product page, download page, docs and support page.

Jano created the first sketch of the new homepage:

He sent it to Leos Tronicek (a visual designer), who created two options:
 

Stakeholders picked the blue one. So Jano, Josef Holy (another interaction designer) and the NetBeans web team fine tuned that one and created a prototype, which was put on staging server.

So, what was next? Of course, Jano wanted to make sure the redesign met the design goals, so he created a script for a second usability study, which was then conducted in September 2006 by Jakub Franc (a user researcher) and Josef Holy. Sorry, that test report is not public, but here is a list of the main issues found with this design for the homepage:

• The upper banner with the main download button seemed to be ignored by significant number of participants.
• A majority of participants complained that information on the homepage did not inform them about NetBeans sufficiently. They expected “short”, “summarized”, “introductory”, “high level” information about the product.

Based on those results, Jano polished the design:

The new website was launched on October 30, 2006, on schedule.

For NetBeans 6.0 there will be couple of new changes, driven mainly by simplified NetBeans packaging and download. We’ll get rid of the whole “Add-on” section which will mean updating the layout of the whole front page. Details are still TBD.