Following up on my last post about user testing icons, it has been incredibly successful!  We’ve had over 100 responses, and are now going through the data to put together a summary. I will post information on our findings as soon as we finish the work.

In the mean time, Charline Poirier, who is in charge of user testing in our team, has created another survey with 5 more icons to help us get more data. If everyone could give this survey another spin, and create some networking effects to help spread the survey to non-Launchpad users, it would be tremendously helpful to us. Here’s the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6iwthaIT4FwPCsMPa1EDEA_3d_3d

As promised, Launchpad has been fully open sourced (as opposed to the initial idea, nothing has been held back). Get it now, fix your favorite pet bug, and improve tens thousands of people’s experience.

Mark Shuttleworth really deserves a lot of praise for this bold and brave move, open sourcing not only the code, but all  it’s history. It’s a fantastic day today.

Update: yes, fully means including soyuz and codehosting, Mark has decided to release everything. The whole history is there.

See the loggerhead page:

Check out what happened when AJAX bug tags editing landed in April:

Note that since Launchpad has the edge/production split, so the changes in the graphs are less drastic since a set of users start interacting with new code before others.

Check out UDS helping out the Gnome Zeitgeist developers: http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2009/06/udss-influence-on-gnome-zeitgeist/

About a month ago, I went to Canonical’s office in London for a sprint, and made good use of my Sunday by visiting the National Gallery. One fantastic thing about London, is the fact that all museums are free, not just because otherwise a few years back I couldn’t of afforded going, but because the fact that they are free gives you the freedom of going to the same ones over and over again, and just calmly visit the bits you’re interested in.

As I was walking by, I saw a painting that really struck me. It was a terrible and dark dragon eating two men, one of them is in agony while it’s face is being eaten off. Quite shocking:

After looking at it for a little while, I went closer to read the description of it, which unexpectedly shocked me ten times as much:

“This gruesome episode comes from the story of Cadmus which is told in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (III: 1-151). Cadmus was sent by the Delphic oracle to follow a cow and build a town where it sank from exhaustion. The cow stopped on the future site of Thebes, and Cadmus, intending to sacrifice it, sent his followers to get water from the neighbouring well of Ares. They were killed by the guardian of the well, a dragon who was the son of Ares. Cadmus then killed the dragon and on the advice of Athena sowed its teeth in the ground, from which sprang up armed men who slew each other, with the exception of five who became the ancestors of the Thebans.”

This got me thinking on how much first impressions are important in the user experience, but really hit me how much more important the actual content is. We tend to relay the content creation and management to “the marketing folks”, when I feel it’s a crucial part that should be worked on together to balance off the amount of text, with the tone in which it’s written, and to ensure that we’re adding value to the users’ experience.

Yes, I’m starting to see UI everywhere.

So, yesterday I was in a taxi, on my way to a friends house, and started chatting with the taxi driver. After going through a few tangents, he finally mentions that he also repairs PCs and all that. So I mention that I work for a company that does a Linux distro called “Ubuntu”. Right after I do that, the guy freaks out, grabs his cellphone, opens it (yes, while still driving), and guess what!? The background image was the Ubuntu logo 
I seem to be bumping into Ubuntu fans^users in the weirdest places lately…

A few days ago, the project ohloh announced they where starting to support bazaar imports.

It’s a pretty cool website, so I’m very happy they now support projects I actually work on

I kicked off an import of Loggerhead’s history, and in less than a day, it was up and working.

Kudos to the ohloh team!

I half-accidentally upgraded to Jaunty today in the middle of a sprint, and, to my surprise, it was completely flawless. Nothing broke and I have a few new shiny things on my laptop 

A week ago I started going through my blog’s logs, and realized that I’d had a jump in visits from Google. Digging a little bit deeper into it, I realized that a lot of people seem to be searching for “working at canonical” phrased in different ways. From what I can gather, it’s split up into two groups: people who want to find a job in Canonical, and people who are considering a specific role and want to know what it’s like.

So, I thought it would be useful to provide information for the dozen of people who land here every day 

If you want to work for Canonical, check out the employment page, it always has the latest job offers: http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/
Among many other things, my team is currently looking for awesome people to join the User Experience Team, the coolest place to be today 

As for what it’s like to work at Canonical, here’s my take on it:
At this point, it’s been a little over five months since I started working full time, although I was doing some contracting work before that, and I’ve been around the Ubuntu and bzr community for ages, so I already knew a lot of the people before joining.
One of the coolest things for me is that the way most of the company works, is basically the same as your typical open source project: mailing lists, irc, distributed, and filled with passionate people. If you have an open source background, the transition should be pretty seamless. Coming from other companies may take a little bit of getting used, but you know how it is, “your mileage may vary“.
The Ubuntu-like atmosphere where everybody is extremely nice and respectful seems to span across the whole company as well. This was especially surprising to me considering that everyone is astonishingly smart, and have done amazing things I had read (and still do!) on news sites for years. My experience is that when too many smart people are together, it’s a much more cut-throat competitive environment. Here, it is not. You could sit down and have a fantastic and interesting dinner with anyone in the company (I’ve shared meals with dozens of different people, and it’s held up true every single time).
On the technical side, all the teams are constantly revising and improving work flows and tools, pushing towards the cutting edge by adopting all kinds of lean and agile development strategies, while still being very much test-driven. What can be more appealing to a developer than that?
Finally, there are so many interesting projects being worked on at the same time, it’s often very hard to keep up with what’s happening. Personally, I believe that the balance between open source development and projects developed in-house as services or for third parties, plays a very big part in making everything happen so fast a two-hundred-and-something people size the company. It’s amazing how so many people are payed to work full time on directly on free software, directly interleaved with the community.

So, as you can guess, my recommendation is that if you ever get the chance to work for Canonical, take it, it will almost certainly be a fulfilling experience.