As the Lead User Experience (UX) Designer at OSRF, I’m very excited to see more users contributing their time and effort to improving the ROS and Gazebo software. As these communities continue to grow, it becomes even more important to consider the usability of ROS and Gazebo, along with the related documentation. By designing user-friendly software and support documents, we make our work more accessible to the broader robotics community, and encourage more novice users to hop on the ROS/Gazebo bandwagon. Addressing usability in our work and designing with our users’ best interests at heart becomes even more critical as society as a whole begins interacting more with robots. Robots and robot software no longer exist exclusively in research labs. They’re working next to people in manufacturing environments, enabling people with paralysis to walk , and helping educate children in schools . Robots are becoming ubiquitous, and as this happens, our work on ROS and Gazebo helps shape the future of robotics and the integration of robots into everyday life. By identifying and designing for our users’ needs, we help advance the state of robotics by making robots more useful, usable and enjoyable to use.

At OSRF, I conduct as many usability testing sessions as we can manage given our project timelines. While we would always benefit from more, the testing we do have time for yields excellent feedback that helps us produce new features with more usable layout, interactions and functionality. While it certainly helps to have a UX Designer such as myself on the payroll, anyone can do usability testing. To encourage all of you, I’ve added a Usability Resources page to our wiki. There, you’ll find information on usability studies, heuristic evaluation, hand-drawn prototypes, and more. Have a look around and give the methods a shot.

There are a lot of awesome robots and robot applications in our future, and with some dedication to making them accessible and usable, we can significantly impact how the general public perceives and interacts with the robots we put out into the world.

The user experience should be considered throughout the development of a product, not just before or after. (Credit: Based on Ben Melbourne’s image)

The many components of User Experience Design. (Credit: By Thomas Glaser, based on Dan Saffer’s work)

Gazebo Terrain Modification Tool paper prototype for user testing.

The synthesis phase of a full-fledged iteratively-designed project. (Credit: Paul Caravelli and John Horstman)