User eXperience has a great importance in today’s software development. Just to clarify, the focus of this discipline is to enhance how a person feels about during his interaction with the system.

The reason why UX is growing in importance is that with social networks and mobile application, the software today has to be comfortably used by a bigger part of the market than in the past years.

The role of UX designer is something we (developers) needed. And I definitely think that also Gnome needed it.

I usually read Planet Gnome’s RSS and, in the last month, a lot of blog posts were concerning  UX: the Gnome people decided to organize an event to talk about usability and User Experience: the Gnome 3 Usability Hackfest to bring the interaction with their desktop environment to the next level.

This is awesome. I’ve read every post published on the planet gnome and I often thought, watching a hand drawn diagram, “wow, it’s so simple and so effective” but I could have never done by myself something similar. And this is why I like to work with some UX designer (but sometimes it’s really hard, but that is another story): I’m a developer, and developers love to complicate everything.

by the way, I look forward to using Gnome 3!