See also: Usability and being human blog
Modes can be dangerous in a user interface, especially if the UI does not make the modes and their states clearly visible. This is often heard advice about UI design. I collected snippets of this advice/heuristics here.
If you have a different point of view or know scientific articles or textbooks that further discuss this, I would love to hear about it!
See also: Usability and being human blog
Developers and UX professionals often seem like beings from different planets. I’ve found that shared understanding about software project goals can sometimes be hard to achieve.
Product and framework thinkers is a helpful way to reason about this (Reichelt, 2009).
Not actually my devices, in case you were wondering
It has come to this. I am at breakfast table with five different portable/wearable devices.
They each have relatively low processing power. They get stuck all the time since I run so many apps.
So I’m thinking, couldn’t each of these devices effortlessly offload processing load to each other, wirelessly? How far are we from a future, where concurrency is so advanced?
This would seem to make it possible to make the user experiences a lot more fluid. We could make mobile devices that provide processing power where user focus is. Accordingly, it would allow deprioritization of tasks on devices the user isn’t currently interested in.
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“Ever had the problem of pictures taken in portrait showing up in landscape in emails, on your blog or on your mobile device? JPEG Autorotate is the solution. It’s quick, it’s simple, it’s free.” -Raquel
Published around 2005, still has 5-10K downloads per year in 2017. This solved an itch lots of people had, with an extremely simple UI.
The Great Boogie Hunt is a simple, yet weird Flash/ActionScript game I made for a Hypermedia course in 2003.
Sometimes we need to show all contents and get rid of that scrollbar
In my layout, my dynamically generated QTableViews seem to get resized to only show one row. I want to have the container of the table views to have a scrollbar instead of the individual table views, which should show full contents.
Qt doesn’t have anything built in for this apparently, you need to calculate and set the size manually.
Small desktop app to solve a practical developer issue. It allows combining the translation files of multiple separate Qt projects, so they can use a common file.
April 2017
ForceProof.com | References | Online desktop UI clickthrough
ForceProof is a 21st century, comprehensive software and hardware product solution for materials testing.
Entrepreneur; Product Management, Front-end development.
We have been on this product development journey since 2010. So far, we’ve engaged customers in industry and in educational institutions in Finland, Sweden, the Baltics, and in Germany.
I finally got sick and tired of all my windows laptops breaking physically one way or another. First there was ThinkPad Edge, then there was the ultrathin Sony Vaio (bought just before Sony sold the business and discontinued the thing).
Computer Says Yes: Intel Processor Identification Utility Says Yes
Developers, Linus Torvalds included, online seemed to agree that MacBooks are the best hardware on the market.
So bought one, and installed Windows 10 with Bootcamp. All was swell, until I decided to try the Beckhoff TwinCAT XAE environment for PLC (programmable logic) programming.
Reach: 91K
~1700 recommendations (Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter & Medium)
Regular expressions you can read: A new visual syntax (and UI)
Created a novel design concept for learning and editing regular expressions.
A sleeping calendar for circadian rhythm disorder patients (G47.2). Built for a friend in 2012.
Spend as much effort as possible in learning to use Qt’s Model View Delegate functionality. It can be a lot of work to wrap your head around, but once you get there, you can do very powerful things with it.
You would guess this would be pretty trivial. Guess again.
I was looking for a way to map a radio buttons to a QDataWidgetMapper as per this forum thread.
See also: Usability and being human blog
At Fluxitek, I am involved not only in the design of the overall user experience, but also in implementation. The temptation to skip UX work is sometimes great for our team.
So: I, too have to keep convincing myself why usability work is absolutely crucial to our product success. I’m now trying to find a succint enough way to express the basic needs for the work.
This is what I’ve got now:
See also: Usability and being human blog
Robert Martin spoke charismatically about test driven development in RailsConf in 2009. (Video link expired)
He promotes the idea of having automated tests (unit tests) and running them all the time to prevent your code from becoming an enormous, unholy mess. When you have tests, you are not afraid of making changes. (In fact, you are effectively improving the user experience of programming1.) You can play all you want, because you know exactly when anything in your code breaks as a result of you changing the code.
Guess what? It applies to UX, too. Three points:
Redesign of online store: virtasenkauppa.fi
The online reseller was running into trouble with their existing online store with 10000’s of items. Their offering had fragmented into many separate stores.
Due to an inventory size of several ten thousands, there were issues with product discoverability. I built a wireframe with an overhaul of the entire information architecture, to prepare for usability testing.
For unit testing, I needed to read ForceProof project database into an in-memory SQLite database, from a .sql text file.
Turns out, Sqlite (at least in Qt) is unable to execute multiple statements in one string.
I have been through several apps for Getting Things Done (excellent Google Talks presentation video). ThinkingRock, Tracks, Google Notebook, Toodledo, Checkvist each had their times during the last five to six years. And, perhaps typical for a usability practitioner, I tend to have strong opinions about their user interfaces.
Visual design, animated transitions; usability testing
Open source collaboration in Qt/QML; website
UX focused on being a simple alarm clock.
And, umh— making damn sure the user wakes up, by making him solve puzzles to mute alarm.
Designed at a time when it was still less clear which UI paradigms would be established norms on mobile touch screens.