Open source projects are gradually incorporating usability methods into their development practices, but there are still many unmet needs. One particular need for nearly any open source project is data that describes its user base, including information indicating how the software is actually used in practice. This paper presents the concept of open instrumentation, or the augmentation of an open source application to openly collect and publicly disseminate rich application usage data. We demonstrate the concept of open instrumentation in ingimp, a version of the open source GNU Image Manipulation Program that has been modified to collect end-user usage data. ingimp automatically collects five types of data: The commands used, high-level user interface events, overall features of the user's documents, summaries of the user's general computing environment, and users' own descriptions of their planned tasks. In the spirit of open source software, all collected data are made available for anyone to download and analyze. This paper's primary contributions lie in presenting the overall design of ingimp, with a particular focus on how the design addresses two prominent issues in open instrumentation: privacy and motivating use.

This paper introduces Jump, a prototype computer vision-based system that transforms paper-based architectural documents into tangible query interfaces. Specifically, Jump allows a user to obtain additional information related to a given architectural document by framing a portion of the drawing with physical brackets. The framed area appears in a magnified view on a separate display and applies the principle of semantic zooming to determine the appropriate level of detail to show. Filter tokens can be placed on the paper to modify the digital presentation to include information not on the original drawing itself, such as electrical, mechanical, and structural information related to the given space. These filter tokens serve as tangible sliders in that their relative location on the paper controls the degree to which their information is blended with the original document. To address the issue of recognition errors, Jump introduces the notion of a reflection window, or an inset window that serves to reproduce Jump's current interpretation of the visual scene. The system's overall design is informed by a set of in situ studies of architectural technologists and formative evaluations with the same group.