fordes

Brainstorming is a rather well known Method for generating ideas. The participants generate as many as possibly ideas without judging the ideas.  Since Osborn introduced it in his work »Applied Imagination« it is in use and its rather popular [1] and part of the design thinking approach [2].

But already …

I love to use (and to contribute) to free educational resources. It was and is a big trend to use videos as a ›modern‹ way to get information across. There are quite a lot of these online. Since some time, you can download lectures from several (high-class) universities, later on …

Recently I began to do a bit of research on security and usability in order to make it a little project for students to work on. I was well aware that the most secure system is not effective if people can't use it and that security (lets say: a very …

The summer term 2013 is finished and with it the human centered design class of the term. On Mozilla's UX blog I wrote a wrap up of the little project.

There is a lot written about qualitative user studies but in my eyes there is few material out there which helps a practitioner to apply the methods. Even the more practical works depend on a large team and lots of time and resources. So the interested designer or researcher may …

E-Learning promises a lot. And seemingly it can live up to its promises – contrary to many other "future topics" there is a lot of empirical research about what to do and what to avoid to make it work.

There is a rather wide range of possibilities to use E-Learning: Recorded …

Reading papers and reports I often see diagrams that are used to visualize values of different categories – e.g. the average hours spend for university-work per week of students of different subjects. It seems rather intuitive for me to use a bar chart: One category (e.g. subject), one value …

Easing the interaction by using visual interface elements instead of a syntax that needs to be learned and remembered is a fairly common principle ("recognition rather than recall") It is a major step forward if the interface is (hopefully) self-explanatory instead of having to read the ***** manual – first for learning …

Testing Interview Analysis

As I found out in the research on last term's class, some things were easy and enjoyed by the students, while some were difficult, like analysing interviews. So I tried out way I explain interview analysis : I recorded a short interview and let people analyse it after …

During the last months I was designing a class for Human Centered Design. I try to practice what I preach, so the class is designed with human centered methods itself. (Pretty meta, hmm?)

So I started the project by doing  interviews with students of a former HCD class. As well …