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 …
Shared Values ⇒ Shared Ideas? What we can Learn from Firefox Australis
If you’re asking yourself “Huh? Australis? Is that edible?”, then let me explain: Australis is the codename of the new user interface that was introduced with Firefox 29 (see the Article on the Mozilla UX Blog for some background). Australis is the result of years of design and prototyping iterations, which were lead by the …
Simple by Default, Powerful When Needed
KDE (back when it was still the name of the desktop environment) and our applications historically stood for powerful features and great flexibility and customizeability. This is what our users love about our software, this is why they choose Plasma and KDE software instead of one of the other Free desktop offerings. And it is …
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, …
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 …
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 …
“You can use it that way, but don’t expect it to work well!”
One of the basic freedoms defined by the GNU project is the user’s freedom to use the software in any way they want. I am a big proponent of that freedom and I prefer it over the very comfortable golden cage that e.g. Apple users so love to live in. However, there is a catch: …
KDE HIG rebooted (again)
I hope that the majority of KDE contributors have at least heard of them, but they have not received much attention lately: The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). Every major operating system and desktop environment has human interface guidelines, because they are an important instrument for ensuring or at least improving consistency in appearance of …
Why something moving in the periphery of the screen immediately grabs your attention
Chances are that you’ve experienced this (probably quite a few times): You’re currently concentrating on what happens in the center of your screen, focusing your eyes on it, when suddenly something blinks, moves, appears or disappears in a corner or at an edge of the screen. Whether you would have known what it was without …
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