Blog

Guerilla UX Testing, and Other Experiences From Akademy

It’s about a month now since the end of Akademy 2018 and I’ve finally found the time to write up some of my impressions from my favorite event of every year, and to encourage all of you to embrace both your inner User Experience (UX) Researcher and your inner guerilla. My Talk: Guerilla UX Testing …

Retrospective: The KDE Mission Survey

It might sound a bit weird that I’m now talking about something that took place two years ago, but I just realized that while the call to participate in the survey for the KDE Mission was published on the Dot, the results have so far not received their own article. People who have participated in …

KDE mascot Konqi holding a rainbow

Hey Mycroft, Drive Me to our Goals!

Intro Almost three months after Akademy 2017, I finally found the time to write a blog post about how I experienced it.Akademy is where I learn again about all the amazing things happening in our community, where I connect the dots and see the big picture of where all the effort in the various projects …

Road sign with text "Results" in front of mountains

Results of the Requirements Survey for a KDE-wide Chat Solution

A week ago, I wrote my previous blog post about a survey I had set up, to figure out how important each of the requirements we had collected for a common IM / chat solution for KDE is for us. All in all, 132 people followed my request to participate in the survey, and answered …

Konqi between chat solutions

The Quest for a Common Chat/IM Solution

A Free/ Open Source Software community usually uses several means of communication: Among them are email, forums, code review and bug tracking systems, nowadays also video chat systems, but one of the central communication channels is usually real-time text communication, also known as instant messaging or chat. Traditionally, IRC has been the cornerstone of chat …

My Plans for Akademy / QtCon

It’s finally that time of the year again which many KDE contributors have been looking forward to: The time when we all get together at Akademy, to meet our KDE friends in person, give and listen to talks and make plans for world domination! This year is special because Akademy will be part of QtCon, …

A Usability Guy’s Journey to Creating his First KDE Tool – Part 2: A Vision

As already suggested in the first article of this series, fixing a bug was just the start of my journey. What I now want to do is help KDE improve our AppStream metadata. Why is this so important to me? I first got in contact with AppStream as part of my interaction design work on …

A Usability Guy’s Journey to Creating his First KDE Tool – Part 1: Baby Steps

I, psychologist by education, human-centered interaction designer by trade – my only completed software project so far being a web-based Advent calendar I made years ago – have embarked on a journey to write my first KDE tool. How did it come to this? It all started with me wanting two things: To change the …

An overview of keyboard shortcuts printed on paper keys

Do Plasma users know all the useful shortcuts?

Dear reader, when Heiko Tietze and I discussed the usefulness of a user assistance feature that is being considered, we realized that we had very different assumptions about how well users know the keyboard shortcuts that KWin and Plasma offer. Although I know that the readership of my blog is not exactly representative of the …

A phone running Plasma Mobile next to a laptop running Plasma

Plasma Mobile’s Vision

We’re currently in the process of designing the first phone user interfaces for KDE applications, applying the KDE Mobile Human Interface Guidelines (a set of soft rules and recommendations for designing user interfaces for mobile applications by KDE). Therefore, the third part of my blog series about the HIG creation still has to wait a …