Gallery is pleased to announce their inclusion in this year's Season of Usability . This program pairs up someone from Gallery and a usability expert to guide a student (YOU!) in a usability related project for Gallery. The project idea: Redesigning Gallery image upload tools.

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums and photos can have view, edit, delete and other permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy.

Gallery is likely installed on millions of websites and is downloaded 4000 times a day.

The Project: Expert benchmark analysis and interface design

Even though Gallery has many ways to upload photos, all of them are somewhat confusing for new users! Sites like Flickr and Facebook have come up with great interfaces for uploading images that are easy to use, and it's time to completely revamp our upload process.

For this project, you will conduct an expert benchmark analysis of 3 'competitor' upload interfaces like Flickr and Facebook, as well as two of the Gallery upload interfaces: the form based upload, and the upload applet. Based on your findings, you will make design suggestions for a completely new upload interface and validate them in a mini usability study with a mocked up interface.

Successful completion of this project will lead to your interface being implemented by our development team, included in the next release of Gallery, and hundreds of thousands of people will use it to upload their photos to their websites!

So check out the details and send in your application no later than April 17, 2008. For your ~15 hours a week for 3 months, you'll receive a $1000 stipend and valuable experience working with usability and Open Source!