Author: colomar

Changes

I’m at a crossroads. My scholarship runs out by the end of September (and my PhD thesis will be at least almost finished by that time), so now I’m at the point where I’ll have to decide what to do in the future. There are plenty of jobs in the usability / user experience sector, …

Which Tool Should we Use for User Interface Mockups?

When I read Heiko Tietze’s quite good introduction to Balsamiq Mockups over at the user prompt blog, I was reminded that I had considered introducing it as a tool for interaction design (not visual design, it’s not made for that) in KDE at some point. What Heiko doesn’t mention in his blog post is that …

The Little Things

Most of the time, I blog about bold, more or less revolutionary ideas for KDE software which may or may not be realized at some point in the future. I do that because I think those may be the most interesting for you, dear blog audience, to read about.The majority of my time spent on …

Mockup of Experience Picker

Choose Your Own Experience – This Time it’s for Real!

As many of you have noticed, yesterday’s blog post “Freedom Maximized!” was indeed an April fool. I had thought that if including KDE 2 as a choice hadn’t given it away yet, the completely over-the-top fake quote from Jens Reuterberg at the end (which he loved so much that it’s now his signature on the …

Proposed dialog Choose Your Plasma Experience

Freedom Maximized!

UPDATE: This was an April fool’s post! However, we actually do plan to realize its basic idea. For more about that, see the next post Whenever you introduce bigger changes to something people like, you’re certain to leave some people behind. GNOME had that experience with GNOME 3, where the resentment from users unwilling to …

Squid Kung Fu – Or “Can I have more hands, please?”

(“Squid Kung Fu”, CC-BY by Windell Oskay) The image above as well as its original title reflects both what my work for KDE currently feels like and what I’d frequently wish for these days: More arms to reach out to all the people I’m currently working with. It is exciting, inspiring, exhausting, all at once. …

Leveraging the Power of Choice

People have quite varied opinions of Plasma and other KDE software, but most agree on one thing: When it comes to flexibility and offering choice for users, we’re unbeaten! This, however, comes with the danger of overburdening especially novice and casual users of our software with too many options. That fine line between too little …

How a usability student found his way to KDE – and why there are so few of us

When I read Jens Reuterberg’s blog post about his impression of the relationship between KDE and designers of all sorts, it reminded me of how I first got in touch with KDE and what we could learn from that experience. It all happened back in 2008. I was a psychology student interested in usability and …

Unified Communication – What KPeople and Nepomuk can do for you (in the future)

Most of the time within KDE I discuss things which are either already out there or in a design/ mockup stage, because those are the points where either I notice problems or developers have questions for me. From time to time, however, I just do a little “thinking outside the box” to come up with …

Different Shades of Freedom in Digital (Game) Sales

Why I buy proprietary video games (If you don’t care why I buy proprietary video games, you may skip this paragraph) Even though more and more – and more and more great! – Free games become available every month, the video game market seems to still be dominated by proprietary software to a much greater …