Painting a Picture: What the ingimp Project Tells Us About Users and Usage

Presenter(s): 
Location: 
S1208
Time: 
2008/10/23 11:00am

One year ago, an experiment in open source usability was initiated: ingimp, an instrumented version of GIMP, was released to collect information about how people actually use GIMP in practice. In that time, ingimp has collected 5,000 logs from over 800 users around the world, representing over 600,000 commands. In this talk, we'll use these data to paint a picture of how people make use of GIMP on a day-to-day basis, a picture created entirely from ingimp's rich, extensive data set. We'll also show how StatsJam, a new MediaWiki extension we developed, allows anyone to explore these data in a data analysis-enhanced wiki environment. The results from this project -- both its tools and data -- have broad applicability to the design of usable end-user open source applications.