fordes

E-Learning promises a lot. And seemingly it can live up to its promises – contrary to many other "future topics" there is a lot of empirical research about what to do and what to avoid to make it work.

There is a rather wide range of possibilities to use E-Learning: Recorded …

Reading papers and reports I often see diagrams that are used to visualize values of different categories – e.g. the average hours spend for university-work per week of students of different subjects. It seems rather intuitive for me to use a bar chart: One category (e.g. subject), one value …

Easing the interaction by using visual interface elements instead of a syntax that needs to be learned and remembered is a fairly common principle ("recognition rather than recall") It is a major step forward if the interface is (hopefully) self-explanatory instead of having to read the ***** manual – first for learning …

Testing Interview Analysis

As I found out in the research on last term's class, some things were easy and enjoyed by the students, while some were difficult, like analysing interviews. So I tried out way I explain interview analysis : I recorded a short interview and let people analyse it after …

During the last months I was designing a class for Human Centered Design. I try to practice what I preach, so the class is designed with human centered methods itself. (Pretty meta, hmm?)

So I started the project by doing  interviews with students of a former HCD class. As well …

Eric Reiss' Web Dogma besteht aus zehn Regeln für Webdesign – mit dem Anspruch unabhängig von Moden und technologischen Weiterentwicklungen zu sein. Ich habe die englische Fassung ins Deutsche übersetzt.

1. Alles, was lediglich existiert, um die interne Politik des Seiteneigners zu erfüllen, muss eliminiert werden
2. Alles, was lediglich existiert um das …

Imagine you are a painter and a salesman tells you that you should get rid of your tools in order to have more space in your studio. "Your workspace is not cluttered by all the other things like brushes and colors. What matters is the painting, not the tools!"

This …

When you knead clay, you have a direct experience of what you are doing. You feel the clay on your skin, its resistance and its smell. But there is more to it than just senses. Action equals changing something here in its very physical appearance. What you do and think …

I am involved in organizing a lecture/workshop series (so called "Werkmodul") that aims for teaching interaction design at the Bauhaus. This is done in cooperation with Mozilla who contacted some great people and asked if they could mentor the students. I was very happy to hear that Cennydd Bowles …

Since the iPhone introduced capacitive touch screens to the consumer market we have touch gestures all around. Gestures are movements that are recognized and trigger a function. Web OS uses this heavily e.g. for closing applications, Apple uses them e.g. for making buttons for deleting mails visible.

It …