Gallery2:Season of Usability 2008

Gallery Usability Home

Project Description

taken form the Season of Usability website (http://season.openusability.org/index.php/projects/2008/gallery):

The Project: Expert benchmark analysis and interface design

Even though Gallery has many ways to upload photos, all of them are somewhat confusing for new users! Sites like Flickr and Facebook have come up with great interfaces for uploading images that are easy to use, and it's time to completely revamp our upload process.

For this project, you will conduct an expert benchmark analysis of 3 'competitor' upload interfaces like Flickr and Facebook, as well as two of the Gallery upload interfaces: the form based upload, and the upload applet. Based on your findings, you will make design suggestions for a completely new upload interface and validate them in a mini usability study with a mocked up interface.

Successful completion of this project will lead to your interface being implemented by our development team, included in the next release of Gallery, and hundreds of thousands of people will use it to upload their photos to their websites!

Project Plan & Log

Week 1 (May 12)

• read results of Katrin's survey
• install Gallery2 on my own server

Week 2 (May 19)

• upload photos to my Gallery2 installation
• start comparison of Gallery2 upload interface(s) with other systems
• search for user feedback concerning photo upload in the forum
• come up with criteria and heuristics for the expert benchmark analysis
• analyzed the upload interfaces of Gallery2, Flickr and Facebook

Week 3 (May 26)

• installed and analyzed Coppermine and Zenphoto
• analyzed Picasa Web Albums

Week 4 (June 2)

• first conclusions from the analysis to make sure I'm on track
• looked at the myspace.com upload interface
• finished up the expert benchmark analysis with some detailed conclusions

Week 5 (June 9)

• got some feedback on the analysis
• Comparison of technologies for the new upload interface (AJAX vs. Flash vs. Java applet vs. ...)

Week 6 (June 16)

• Upload_interface_mockup

Week 7 (June 23)

• gather feedback on the mockup

Week 8 (June 30)

• be at the Sakai Conference [1] and talk about integration of usability and open source
• start Personas/Scenarios for Gallery

Week 9 (July 7)

Week 10 (July 14)

• GalleryCon2008

Week 11 (July 21)

Week 12 (July 28)

Week 13 (August 4)

Week 14 (August 11)