Kickoff Start Menu - A New KDE Menu?

openSUSE 10.2 will have a redesigned KDE start menu created by the KDE and usability team at SUSE, after doing usability testing with other start menus:

"We now have a working prototype, code-named 'Kickoff' (started during world soccer championship, obviously), which is currently being tested with real users in the SUSE usability lab. At aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Coolo will give a Start Menu Research talk about what we learned during this project. Also, we are preparing a web-page to document our research."

This is how the menu looks like right now:





You can see the Kickoff start menu in action here.

aKademy is the annual meeting of the KDE community. This year, it will be held at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. The event will span nine days and includes an exciting program of talks and presentations by outstanding KDE developers, joint development, bug-fixing & coding sessions, workshops for all KDE contributors, and design, usability and polishing work.

aKademy will be opened by the two-day KDE Contributors Conference, followed by the general assembly of the KDE e.V. and an intensive week of developing, discussing and meeting people.

Please see more on aKademy 2006 home page.