fordes

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 …

"The view, that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor."

– Lucy Suchman in Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, p. 27

Plans are deemed to be important. But what do plans do? And what do …

Since several years, I write on a “Beg­inner’s Guide to Finding User Needs”. One of my recent changes was the first section about why one should do user research. It is titled “User research helps you to create more useful products” ¹.

So, how does user research do …

I was recently drinking coffee and making some observations on the system that the café used keep track of what people had ordered.

The weather was good and many (young-ish) people were there. The café was partly inside (ca. 30m²) and largely outside (ca. 100m²). The interior and tables outside …

“Principles of Neural Science“ ¹ is a 1400+ pages book on neuroscience, a textbook classic co-written by one of the discipline’s founders, Eric Kandel.

Why did I read this book? Well, during my bachelor’s and master’s I had an informal project to read a non-fiction book of …

At the WikidataCon 2017 I organized a participatory design workshop on documenting and sharing Wikidata editing workflows. Here, I describe what we did. It should be sufficient information to organize such a workshop yourself. I used similar methods before, but this particular way is new, so if you try it …

The most annoying thing about designing complex interfaces in a tool like Inkscape, Illustrator, Axure or Balsamiq is managing the grouings of the elements:

• All buttons of a window should be grouped in the window.
• Search icon should move with the search input field.
• A menu item should be grouped …

TL;DR: Design methods are often based on in ideas that were popular in the early 20th century: scientific positivism and industrial production. This hides essential, but messy aspects of design.

In his book The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön uses a concept named “Technical Rationality”. It is the idea, that …