fordes

I research use of instructions in my PhD – so, if you used this guide, I would be happy to hear how you used it!  Read it begin-to-end? Tried the most interesting parts? Just reading first and then in practice? Followed it with your own logo design? Drop me a line …

Recently, I browsed itch.io’s tools section, a list of many tools, largely for game creation or general computer-supported creativity: Musik, zines, map generators, and batch tools. They remind me of late 90s and early 2000s free- and shareware: Small, useful tools created often by single programmers, sometimes a …

“If only they would know what we know!…”

Developers should learn how to design user interfaces and everyone should learn how to code: The cry for a better education of others in ones own field is frequent: If they only knew what we know, the world would be better and …

I sometimes review slides and text documents for others. There are some areas where some simple changes can improve the look and feel a lot.

Check for consistent use of fonts

When you copy and paste text you easily end up with different fonts in the same documents. Often they …

I always wondered why open source projects love community-driven logo competitions (almost all logos of Wikimedia projects seem to have been created this way). What happens is this: A person or a group makes the case the the project needs a logo or needs an improved logo. If they are …

Methods are a core topic in UX design. The human centered design cycle, Design Thinking steps or other variants that suggest how to structure one’s design activities. Not designing methodically is framed as wrong and as missing out on valuable insights ⁹. However, it is unclear if formally structured …

In most experimental quantitative research, it is essential to have a research question, or rather: an hypothesis. However, in qualitative research, a research question can be useful, too as it helps to communicate to others what you are doing and it can help to guide your research. In contrast to …

As UX Designers and UX Researchers, we often talk about problems and user needs as “found”, “uncovered” and “arrived at”.

I was going through a guide on Design Thinking⁶ and the language used suggested that the process of design research is like going through a landscape¹:

• The Method …

E. Raymonds Essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is an essay on Open Source development. It is not about open source as a legal construct but about a possible development style of bottom-up activities in a community of creators. This bottom-up style Raymond calls “bazaar” and contrasts it with the …

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 …