I’ve recently been trying to catch up on my community source blog reading. I just stumbled across a posting from our own Mara Hancock, who wrote a very interesting and in-depth entry on Penn State’s Terra Incognita about the user experience of open source software in higher education.

Mara’s article touches on the challenges and potential she sees in community source software development for creating tools that best meet the needs of teachers and learners. I share her belief that open communities are uniquely positioned to find new, collaborative ways to improve the usability and accessibility of our products. I was particularly intrigued by Mara’s assertion that universities and other educational institutions are well-equipped to do this because we work directly in the midst of our users’ activities. She says:

“We are uniquely situated smack dab in the middle of our own usability lab. There are few commercial or open source environments that can count themselves as this lucky. One of the biggest barriers to implementing a user centered design process that I have heard from UI Designers working in the private sector is their inability to gain consistent access to their users. Let’s make the most of our opportunity!”

As part of this, we need to foster iterative user testing throughout the entire software development lifecycle, and to better respond to what we find out when we talk with and observe users. It’s also critical that we find ways within our communities to encourage and reward non-code contributions such as those from interaction designers and accessibility testers.

If you haven’t already seen Mara’s article, it’s definitely worth a read.