Test driven development and usability testing

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:

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Future proofing learning in software development

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 … Read more

Online store redesign for enhancing discoverability

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.

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Mobile alarm clock sure to wake you up: EvilAlarm (Qt/QML)

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 … Read more

UI Design: Balancing User Needs with Progressive Disclosure

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 … Read more

Web UI redesign: Moodle Quiz UI Redesign

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 of negotiation, I got a new, dramatically more novice friendly design accepted and implemented.

Recommendation available on LinkedIn profile.

ACM SIGCHI Finland awarded an honorary mention for my thesis on this work in their thesis competition.

I also made an initiative as a summer project to start creating a Human Interface Guidelines document for Moodle, though that eventually didn’t take off.

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Mobile game: The Great Boogie Hunt

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 … Read more

Winnie the Pooh personality test

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 … Read more