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 […]
Author Archives: savolai
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 […]
Online store redesign for enhancing discoverability
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, […]
Reading in an .sql text file into an SQLite database in Qt
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.
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 […]
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 […]
Moodle/open source usability talk slides
Usability and Users’ Experiences in Moodleland presented in iMoot 2010
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 […]
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 […]
Web: Electronic Exam Solution (2006)
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.
Desktop Diagram App: ReDash (Java)
ReDash – a tree drawing application is a windowing Java application for modeling simple hierarchies, built in 2004.
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 […]