SilverStripe

Our ideas on usability, shared.

Posted by Sigurd Magnusson on 4 August 2009

Two weeks ago SilverStripe featured at the world's largest open source software conference, OSCON. We gave a talk to a crowded room of software developers titled, Ten Usability Epiphanies for Your Open Source Web-app. The slides are available in PDF and you can watch the entire session online. This will give you insight into how SilverStripe thinks about usability.

After the talk, several people asked for URLs mentioned in the talk, so we've made them available for everyone here:

• The book mentioned at the beginning is Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running The Asylum.
• The excellent 394-page usability resource by Apple is the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
• Other material on the topic of open source usability includes a post by Mathew Thomas, The Usability of Open Source Software by David M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale, a thesis by Brad Weikel, and several short articles by Matt Asay, such as What open source can learn from Apple.
• To be wowed by what is possible with JavaScript, check out the presentation software at 280slides.com, written in the cappuccino objective-JavaScript framework.
  
• The other JavaScript frameworks I mentioned included Ext JS, jQuery, and Yahoo's YUI.
• Finally, I suggested that d7ux.org is very interesting. This is because it will detail the "before, during, and after" of an open source project going through a major usability effort, with all of the thinking, decisions, and code intended to be out in the open.