Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

I was fortunate enough to spend three days at the IxDA‘s Interaction 12 conference in Dublin’s swanky new Convention Centre this past week. When you’re more used to attending Linux/free/open-source-type gigs, it’s always a bit of an eye-opener to attend a completely different type of conference, and this was no exception… although while the audience at any given talk was awash with iPads and iPhones rather than Linux tablets and Android phones, in many ways the sense of community and desire to drink beer was very much the same 🙂

Anything in it for for GNOME?

Well, interaction design is interaction design, so most of the talks were applicable in one way or another. A couple struck me as perhaps being of particular interest to our design community, though.

Information Architecture Heuristics

Most of us are familiar with Neilsen and Molich’s 10 usability heuristics, and they’re still quite useful… but they’re also over 20 years old, and computing devices have moved on a lot since then. Abby Covert presented 10 updated heuristics for modern interaction design, presented in her slide deck here.

In some ways they’re not actually not all that surprising, or indeed different from the original 10. But there’s merit in validation, too, and I’ll certainly give them a whirl the next time I’m doing a heuristic evaluation.

Demystifying Design: Fewer Secrets, Greater Impact

Lean UX advocate Jeff Gothelf gave his talk about how to take some of the perceived magic out of UX design, by involving non-designer peers and managers more in the design process, to help reduce the amount of bike-shedding and other detrimental activities that can occur when stakeholders don’t necessarily understand how or why a particular design decision was reached.

I know this is something we all try to do in communities like ours… in some ways it’s one of our defining characteristics. But even still, we often find ourselves open to accusations of doing “design in secret” (a.k.a. “on IRC”), so perhaps there are some things we can learn from Jeff’s slide deck.

Communication & Content in Web Software

As a bit of a grammar pedant, I enjoyed this talk by local IxDA stalwart Des Traynor, much of which focused on how microcopy (labels and other snippets of text in your UI) can make or break your website or your application. Of course we already have some awesome documentation guys in GNOME who worry about this sort of stuff, but IMHO we don’t always involve them enough in copywriting the UIs themselves. Des hasn’t put his latest slides up just yet, but there’s a recent version here, along with a short blog post and a video him giving a similar talk in September.

Hacking space exploration and science

Finally, as a bit of an astronomy geek myself, I was surprised and pleased to see a talk about this topic at an interaction design conference. Ariel Waldman is the founder of the Science Hack Day in San Francisco, and spoke about that, Galaxy Zoo and Planet Hunters, among other things. Not too much in her slide deck that’s directly applicable in a GNOME context, I just enjoyed the talk 🙂