How to Run a Usability Test

One of the most important steps of the design process is “usability testing”, it gives designers the chance to put themselves in other people’s shoes by gathering direct feedback from people in real time to determine how usable an interface may be. This is just as important for free and open source software development process as it is any other.

Though free software projects often lack sufficient resources for other more extensive testing methods, there are some basic techniques that can be done by non-experts with just a bit of planning and time—anyone can do this!

Joining Purism!

Personal news time! Starting in August I’m going to be joining the team at Purism working on the design of PureOS and related software products, but what I’m very excited about is that I get to continue to work on GNOME design!

I have to thank Purism for even offering me this opportunity it is beyond my wildest expectations that I would get to to work on Free Software professionally let alone in design!

Taking the "User" out of Design

As a designer, I’ve never been totally comfortable with referring to people as “users”. I find the term unethical as it minimizes the idea that people have any individuality or sense of agency, and I believe the term is obsolete as it is rooted in a past when the connection between a person using a computer and the computer itself was clear, which is no longer the case in the modern age.

Basic Linux Virtualization with KVM

By no measure, am I an expert on all the ins and outs of virtualization, hell, before I started looking into this stuff a “hypervisor” to me was just a really cool visor.

But after a reading a bunch of documentation, blog posts and StackExchange entries, I think I have enough of a basic understanding—or at least I have learnt enough to get it to work for my limited use case—to write some instructions.

Moving Beyond Themes

Over the years FreeDesktop platforms have come a long way in terms of usability and as we strive to make them better platforms for application developers, I think it’s time to shed one more shackle that slows that down: themes.

Now, coming from me that view may be a surprise (because of all those themes that I call personal projects) but I do feel it’s necessary mainly because the level of visual customisation that is being done at the distribution level has led to widespread visual fragmentation which impacts both user- and developer-friendliness.