Joseph Brower

At Nexus we have been trying to get PHPTimeclock so that it is ready for the everyday user. It has been quite an experience. From a technical standpoint, things have been quite bug free. We only had two minor bugs, both of which were easily resolved. What has been far more difficult is the polishing of the user interface.

We taught Justin (who has kindly been helping us as acting as our non-technical tester) how to properly file a bug report and he went to town on it. After a few days of testing he came up with over 25 usability issues that would cause problems with any new or non-technical user.

A lot of these problems have been related to poor working, orthers were simply poor placement of buttons. We are still making our way through the list, but this has already vastly improved the usability of the timeclock software.

So why am I blogging about this? Two reasons. First, we can always use more people testing. Second, if open source is to succeed beyond the technical audience, it needs to focus on the end user. That means we need to be going directly to the end users and learn what they like, dislike, and would want changed. Too many open source projects are nearing technical perfection but will never see the user base that they should because end users don’t see how good it is. With so many volunteer man hours being expended, we the community, should make it our responsibility to see to it that they are properly tested for usability. We the developers need to put aside our pride and make sure that each and every reported bug is resolved, even ones that are just for usability and that we feel have easy workarounds. Only then can we achieve the polish needed to reach everyone.

I guess my point is that we need to be seeking all bugs, not just ones that are technical. This includes small annoyances with software, not just showstopping bugs.