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Author(s): Matthew Paul Thomas

User testing is the acid test for whether your software can fulfill its purpose: it's no good having fast, efficient, reliable software if no-one can learn it or tolerate it. Sun Microsystems published the results of public testing on Gnome in 2001, and Novell in 2005 and 2006. Other than that, however, there has been little formal user testing of Gnome published. In this presentation, Matthew shows the results of user testing Canonical has been running on Gnome and other Ubuntu components, and offers ideas on how you can run your own user tests quickly and cheaply.

Author bio: Matthew Paul Thomas has been involved with Gnome since version 1.0 of the Human Interface Guidelines in 2002. Previously he was a contributor to the Mozilla and WordPress projects. Since 2005, Matthew has been working at Canonical as a human interface designer. This is his first Guadec.