Learning from Books: Graphic Design

I thought it would be interesting to review what I tried to learn from books in the past. Learning is probably the easiest if you can learn it from a mentor by direct participation. Nevertheless, we put a lot of stuff in books and have people (like me) learn from …

read more ...

Rule-based UX Evaluations – undervalued methods

TL;DR: Rule-based evaluations for usability are an efficient way to improve interfaces

There are a lot of designs that could be improved. The “right” way to do this is testing with users while applying the appropriate method for the appropriate questions. After all, User Experience design is an empirically …

read more ...

Open Fieldnotes in Remote Interviews

TL;DR: Make fieldnotes in a document shared with the participant, go over the notes together at the end of the research session

In qualitative research I do at work, participants of the research talk to me and demonstrate things while I (or a note taker) write notes to remember …

read more ...

Mutual Learning in Participatory Design

I came across participatory design when I was wondering how software like Mediawiki, Firefox or LibreOffice could be produced: The software is understood as being created by by different groups of people: employees, hired by the software’s supporting organizations, volunteer programmers, and user communities with various degrees of involvement …

read more ...

Use of artifacts in design projects

This post started as a presentation I gave to a group of computer science students in a HCI class as an invited practitioner. My first intention was to “talk about work”, show some currently worked-on projects and introduce to the order and mess of roles, projects and tasks in software …

read more ...

What do plans to do?

"The view, that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor."

– Lucy Suchman in Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, p. 27

Plans are deemed to be important. But what do plans do? And what do …

read more ...