Usability/Workshop/CurrentState2
Z Kadu
Current state of the Kadu Usability Project as of 10.2009:
--Akai 21:51, 31 paź 2009 (UTC)
As you can read on the project's main page Kadu is an Open Source Gadu-Gadu protocol instant messenger for Linux, BSD and OS X. It is the most popular Gadu-Gadu client on Linux (probably on BSD too) and the most notable Open Source application created in Poland. Chances are, you can find Kadu in the repository of your favorite Linux distribution.
Gadu-Gadu is the most popular IM service in Poland, with over 7.8 million registered accounts and approximately 6.5 million users online daily. Ever since its creation in 2001 Kadu has been a Gadu-Gadu - only internet messenger, meant primarily for Polish users of this protocol. Right now we're working on a new version of Kadu with support for more protocols, primarily Jabber but also others in the longer run. We hope to attract international userbase with Kadu as a Jabber client as well as make life easier for Polish users, many of whom use Jabber on a daily basis (according to our user survey, that's the case for 30% of Kadu users). Along with adding support for multiple protocols, we're planning to support simultaneous connections to more than one communication network, usage of multiple accounts of the same protocol at the same time and metacontacts. All these enhancements require big changes in the interface of Kadu.
The Kadu Usability Project has been started in the summer of 2008 to provide developers with the design of the multiprotocol interface for Kadu, as well as to address other usability issues in Kadu in the future. The people behind it are me ( Joanna Pierożek aka Akai ) and Kadu's PR manager Piotr Pełzowski with minor contributions from other people and organizations mentioned here and additional help from various members of Kadu's user community and, of course, the developers. During the summer of 2009 Kadu has participated as a project in the OpenUsability's Season of Usability - a Google Summer of Code-like series of sponsored student projects meant to bring students of usability/user-interface design/interaction design and FLOSS projects together. Thanks to this opportunity, Mike Harmala, a master's student at the University of Michigan School of Information studying Human Computer Interaction and Incentive Centered Design, has worked with our project for several months, being the first person from outside Poland contributing to Kadu.
Previously the work on the Usability project has been conducted mostly in Polish so in preparation for the Season of Usability essential documents needed to be translated to English (see: http://www.kadu.net/w/Usability) and during the summer we've switched almost entirely to English on the mailing list, in the documents and in the mock-ups we've produced. As far as the Usability project goes, we're ready to accomodate international contribution without making anyone feel intimidated. Hopefully, along with introducing Jabber and other protocols useful for people from outside Poland into Kadu, regular contributors from other countries will indeed join our ranks.
The work on the Kadu Usability project has initially started in July 2008 from conducting a quick survey with the developers of the project. It's been used to gather information about the goals of the project, intended userbase and usage conditions. The results are available in English here.
The next step was conducting a user survey to get demographic data about our users, determine the ways in which they use Kadu and get their suggestions and opinions about introducing multiple protocols into their favorite IM. The survey has been successfully conducted over the Internet in Polish using LimeSurvey software. Thanks to the very effective advertisement on various Polish websites and forums about FLOSS and Linux the survey, which has been active on 1 - 25.08.2008, has been completed by 5035 participants, providing us with vast amounts of useful data. Actually, the survey had two versions: one meant for people using other IMs than Kadu (including past Kadu users) and one meant for current Kadu users. The version for the current userbase alone has been completed by 3018 participants. The survey included questions about age, sex, computer skills, the operating system / window manager used, the usage of Kadu and its optional modules, other IMs and communication protocols used as well as open questions gathering suggestions about Kadu's further development and introducing multiple protocols in Kadu. Because of the tremendous amount of data collected (the survey had a few open questions that were filled in by 1000 participants each on average) the analysis of the results has taken two months and ended on 24.10.2008 with the publication of a 35-pages long report (in Polish only).
Based on the data acquired in the developers and user surveys the personas for the Kadu IM has been built. Our primary persona - Piotr, represents the typical user of Kadu as far as demographic data goes (basing on the user survey). His usage of multiple communication protocols is more extensive than is typical of current Kadu users to help us focus on extending Kadu as a versatile multiprotocol IM.
The secondary personas - Andrzej and Kasia - represent two extremities that has been actually recorded in the user survey (albeit in lesser quantities) with all the other user survey paticipants falling somewhere in between them. Andrzej is a very experienced user of computers and a professional sysadmin. Because Kadu is primarily a Linux/BSD application its userbase tends to be more advanced than that of similar programs on other platforms. With Kadu becoming a Jabber client in the near future, the amount of extremely experienced computer users using Kadu may become even bigger - Jabber is a protocol of choice of dedicated and advanced users of FLOSS.
At the same time the userbase is certainly not dominated by such people because of Kadu's graphical user interface, ease of use and the word-of-mouth publicity it gets of a simple to get used to clone of a very popular (at least in Poland) Windows application - the official Gadu-Gadu client. For these reasons we can presume Kadu is an IM of choice for many novice Linux users from Poland. Kasia - a teenage girl with no particular interest in computers, is a novice user persona.
Supporting personas aren't based on actual research. They represent future users of Kadu that may appear when Kadu becomes a multiprotocol messenger, therefore becoming attractive for non-Polish people (in case of Albert, we've assumed that a new IM with no international userbase will attract dedicated and more experienced FLOSS users first) and after fully-functional, supported and mature Windows and OS X ports are complete (in case of Paweł and Kuba). Additionally, from the mutliprotocol interface design standpoint, Paweł and Kuba represent Gadu-Gadu-only users we cannot forget about.
In 11.2008 the actual work on the design of the multiprotocol user interface has been started. The progress is being documented on our wiki page and the Kadu Design Feedback mailing list is used for announcements, comments and communication with the developers.
First the elements of the interface that needed to be changed were determined. A review of other multiprotocol messengers has been conducted (with emphasis on Kopete, Pidgin, Psi and Gajim - the direct competitors of Kadu on the Linux platform). Some work on use scenarios has been done and an effort to establish a concise dictionary of terms introduced to Kadu along with the multiprotocol/multi-account/metacontact functionality has been made.
Draft mockups for most of the windows that needed to be introduced or redesigned were ready by the time Mike Harmala joined our team in July 2009 as a Season of Usability student. In the course of his work with us Mike has conducted a heuristic evaluation of the mockups we've previously prepared, based on Nielsen Heuristics , KDE Human Interface Guidelines and other resources (see Mike's overview), identifing a lot of issues that needed to be cleared up before the final version of the mockups could start to be implemented by the developers and providing suggestions on how to deal with these. The final contribution Mike has made to Kadu was a set of final, both functionally and visually polished mockups for most of the windows that would be introduced into Kadu as soon as it becomes a MultiIM, including the Configuration Wizard, chat window and several account and contact management windows. The final mockups have been shown to the community for the first time during Kadu's presentation at the Software Freedom Day 2009 in Wrocław (you can see videos from the presentation - in Polish - here).
In the meantime, the regular Kadu Usability team has been working on the contact list, menus and history window redesign. At this point (10.2009) we're almost ready to provide the developers with full specification of all the windows they need to change or introduce into Kadu 0.6.6 to make it a user-friendly multiprotocol Internet Messenger. We know the risks of radical changes to the design our users have enjoyed and gotten used to so far (even if it wasn't that great in the first place) but we hope what we've come up with is good enough to both make our current users stay with Kadu and enjoy its enhanced functionality and improved usability and attract new users who either need a multiprotocol messenger or a user-friendly Jabber client.