fordes

Whether in books or Wikipedia: A lot of knowledge is presented and edited as text. One assumes this text reflects something about the world (if it is true and not wrong because of deceived senses, bad research or lying). This such text can be written by a person who has …

As UX Designers and UX Researchers, we often talk about problems and user needs as “found”, “uncovered” and “arrived at”.

I was going through a guide on Design Thinking⁶ and the language used suggested that the process of design research is like going through a landscape¹:

• The Method …

Wikipedia can be edited by everyone. But after the honeymoon phase until 2006, Wikipedia saw had a slow decline of people joining and staying. Why is it so hard to retain editors?

One way to explain the problem of retention could be the idea of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)^{1 …}

Repeatedly, me and my colleagues complain about the lack of documentation: Why is the software constructed in this particular way, how are users supposed to know how to set this up etc. We say there should be “more” documentation but, alas, there is just not enough time to write it …

E. Raymonds Essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is an essay on Open Source development. It is not about open source as a legal construct but about a possible development style of bottom-up activities in a community of creators. This bottom-up style Raymond calls “bazaar” and contrasts it with the …

I thought it would be interesting to review what I tried to learn from books in the past. Learning is probably the easiest if you can learn it from a mentor by direct participation. Nevertheless, we put a lot of stuff in books and have people (like me) learn from …

TL;DR: Rule-based evaluations for usability are an efficient way to improve interfaces

There are a lot of designs that could be improved. The “right” way to do this is testing with users while applying the appropriate method for the appropriate questions. After all, User Experience design is an empirically …

TL;DR: Make fieldnotes in a document shared with the participant, go over the notes together at the end of the research session

In qualitative research I do at work, participants of the research talk to me and demonstrate things while I (or a note taker) write notes to remember …

I came across participatory design when I was wondering how software like Mediawiki, Firefox or LibreOffice could be produced: The software is understood as being created by by different groups of people: employees, hired by the software’s supporting organizations, volunteer programmers, and user communities with various degrees of involvement …

This post started as a presentation I gave to a group of computer science students in a HCI class as an invited practitioner. My first intention was to “talk about work”, show some currently worked-on projects and introduce to the order and mess of roles, projects and tasks in software …