Integrating Usability and Software Engineering
The last two days I attended a workshop organized by the GI on the integration of usability engineering and software engineering. It was pretty interesting and I got a bundle of new ideas from it. The...
View ArticleSeason of Usability: Projects Opening
Interested students with a background in Usability, Interface Design, Interaction Design or related topics are invited to support non-commercial OpenSource-Projects with their knowledge and skills in...
View ArticleSeason of Usability: 2nd Round of Application
Season of Usability is one of my favourite activities of the year. But it has its downsides as well… This year again I will mentor – together with Bodo from TV-Browser – one of the Season of Usability...
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LinuxTag 2008
Only one week left to LinuxTag in Berlin (28th to 31st of May)! It is always a great event and I am looking forward to meet all the great people that are engaged in the OpenSource community! And of...
View ArticleSeason of Usability 2009 looking for students
Good news for all students of usability, user-interface design, interaction design,…: The initiative Open Usability has started the call for participation for the Season of Usability 2009 (a very big...
View ArticleDo we need A Centralized, State-of-the-Art Open Source Usability Lab? Or:...
Today I found an article by Sam Dean who asks for a Centralized, State-of-the-Art Open Source Usability Lab. He refers to a cnet article by Matt Asay in which he postulates what Open Source can learn...
View ArticleLessons from Season of Usability
This summer I participated in the SoU project with Gallery, the open source photo sharing software. The broad goal of the project was to conduct a survey to learn more about Gallery’s users in moving...
View ArticleHello planet KDE!
I am very happy that our blog is now aggregated on planet KDE! I am Björn, usability professional for more than 10 years and one of the founders of OpenUsability.org. I have been working in and with...
View ArticleUsability meets Open Source on Berlin LinuxTag
LinuxTag 2010, anybody? We invite you to take part in an informal meeting to share thoughts, experiences and other information covering the topics Usability and User Experience in the Free Software...
View ArticleUniversal Design and Free Software
A couple of days ago I visited an expert´s forum concerning Universal Design: “Universal Design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible,...
View ArticleHello LibreOffice!
In long discussions with Christoph (who was one of the most active UX people in OpenOffice) I always said that I think OpenOffice has no future. I came to this conclusion because I think Free Software...
View ArticleDesigner vs. Developer? A FLOSS perspective.
Background You need to know that I am a psychologist. I see myself rather as a designer than a developer, because I do not actually write code. But I also do not do graphic-design. My approach to...
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If you are going to Berlin and want to know more about the users of your...
My interest is to find out how to make better use out of the users of a software. If you are interested what this could mean for you, join me on a BoF or simply ask me when you see me, e.g. on the...
View ArticleImpressions of a usability guy on the Berlin Desktop Summit 2011
As Akademy / Desktop Summit was in Berlin this year, I took the chance to participate. I probably wouldn’t if it had been somewhere else – and I have to admit: It was a great decision to take part (and...
View Article2012 – A good year for the user experience of Free Software?
I haven’t been blogging for a long time. To give you some short reason for that: After almost 6 years I have decided to leave Apliki, the company I once co-founded. This process was a little...
View ArticleShape the Future of Managing Network Connections in KDE
From the Forge Sprint 2011 in Madrid on, as part of my engagement for the OpenUsability.org initiative, I have been in constant contact with the KDE Solid people and esp. with Lamarque and Jan who are...
View ArticleFind the best Icon for ‚Save as…‘
TL;WR: Play this game! Competition for a new ‚Save as…‘ Icon The icons for ‚Save‘ and ‚Save as…‘ are frequently discussed. In the context of the World Usability Day 2014, German newspaper ‚Stuttgarter...
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How designers think about ‚Save as…‘
The metaphor of a floppy for Save is one of the most controversially discussed and challenged icons. There are haters who argue that many younger people never have seen a floppy (except at the Save...
View ArticlePlease participate in a survey about KDE’s download manager KGet
KGet is a versatile and user-friendly download manager. It has a lot of useful features and was designed to work well with Plasma and other KDE applications. KGet has a long history in KDE, the first...
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Libreoffice Human Interface Guidelines: First steps
The work on usability and design is often seen as some kind of anarchistic creativity: some people receive divine inspiration out of the blue and and read the tea leaves to decide how features have to...
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Libreoffice Human Interface Guidelines: The second step
Almost a month has passed and it’s time for an update. The Libreoffice UX team finished two more guidelines that are introduced in this posting. The interesting point is not what the guidelines...
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Libreoffice Human Interface Guidelines: Context Menu and Sidebar
We started the work on Libreoffice human interface guidelines (HIG) this year and published so far two parts: the foundation with statements about the vision, persona, and our manifesto and guidelines...
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