In any software project, we need to understand the people who will use the product. There are many different points of view onto what approach we should take. Spool: Vision, feedback, culture Some promote approaches to usability practice alternative to User Centered Design (UCD). Spool (2008, 2009) calls the attention of the usability community to the …
Continue reading “User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users”
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). Developers, Linus Torvalds included, online seemed to agree that MacBooks are the best hardware on …
Continue reading “Getting Twincat XAE to function on MacBook Pro”
Reach: 91K~1700 recommendations (Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter & Medium) Regular expressions you can read: A new visual syntax (and UI) Regular expressions are a technical tool, not unlike a domain specific programming language. It is intended for situations where you need to match patterns in text, in order to filter or manipulate it in various …
Continue reading “UX Design Concept: Learnable Regular Expressions (2016)”
A sleeping calendar for circadian rhythm disorder patients (G47.2). Built for a friend in 2012. This is a simple single page PHP script. A key reason this is listed is to demonstrate that often it doesn’t take complex tech or extreme polish to meet a need and provide a lot of value.
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 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 …
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Guiding learning can be a deceptive thing. Where an expert might think something is simple, the student’s journey toward understanding is filled with twists and turns the expert no longer even remembers. This is really the core challenge of teaching: how to communicate the complex when your own mind has already largely automated those early …
Authors: Olli Savolainen and Daniel Schildt Olli: In my opinion, it is important in the teaching of programming fundamentals to focus on the essential: Learning what will help you get started quickly and implement your own ideas. This is particularly challenging with C and C++ languages, teaching of which is sometimes still needed. When a …
Continue reading “Future proofing learning in software development”
Redesign of online store: virtasenkauppa.fiThe 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, …
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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.
Visual design, animated transitions; usability testingOpen 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 …
Continue reading “Mobile alarm clock sure to wake you up: EvilAlarm (Qt/QML)”
The Problem As your platform matures, the number of features inevitably increases. While some users may require these new functionalities, others may find them distracting. This leads to a significant challenge: how can you accommodate the varying needs of a diverse user base? This situation is particularly true when designing an existing or new user …
Continue reading “UI Design: Balancing User Needs with Progressive Disclosure”
Usability and Users’ Experiences in Moodleland presented in iMoot 2010
Overall UX design with open source community and exploration of what forms UX work in an open source project can take.Moodle Quiz: UI for creating and editing quizzes and exams, etc. I championed teacher needs, discoveries originating from University of Tampere. I engaged the Moodle.org community to reconsider their UX priorities. After about a year …
You can add the mobile web app as an icon to you home screen: View GIF animation recording of game (1.2MB) Github repository for the progressive web app The Great Boogie Hunt is a simple, yet weird Flash/ActionScript game I made for a Hypermedia course in 2003. 2022: Game works again in 2022 thanks to …
UX DesignUniversity of Tampere; introduction in Finnish & in English This was a pioneering project in Finland to implement the first large scale electronic exam system, using video surveillance and predefined question banks. Recommendations available on LinkedIn profile.
ReDash – a tree drawing application is a windowing Java application for modeling simple hierarchies, built in 2004.
A playful experiment in online advertising; a simple “personality test” . It was featured on a local radio station sometime around the year 2006, and gained quite a bit of traffic due to that. It got me some hundreds of euros in the oughties to support my studies. After placing the ads, the total impressions …
