Dearadh Oscailte Abú! (Open Design Forever!)

Presentations

This is a selection of presentations I have made. I have a non-exhaustive list of many more from over the years on my Fedora People page.

Automation in Inkscape

You’ve got to generate 100 graphics following the same template with different information and you’re dreading it. Not to fear: you can automate it using Inkscape! Learn how in this session.

User Experience (UX) + Free Software = ❤

We want free software to matter, to reach its highest potential to change the world for the better. In many fields, however, there is a massive gap between the existence of these tools and their actual usage on the front lines. How do we bridge that gap, so free software has a chance to make a difference? We need better UX to bridge that gap. This talk outlines a case study of a free software platform – the ChRIS project – aiming to bridge that gap between the wealth of free sofware medical analytical tools and frontline clinical practice with a user experience that meets the needs of medical researchers and clinicians. We believe ChRIS will help deliver the UX clinicians need to give them access to amazing free software tools that can improve medicine.

Fedora’s New Logo

Various presentations on Fedora’s new logo – a topic that was highly-requested the year of the logo’s release.

Designing UX for specialized workflows

Have you ever been stuck wondering how to construct a user experience for a highly specialized workflow that you’re not even familiar with yourself? What if the application is so novel, no clear UX model exists and you’re starting with a completely blank slate? Red Hat UX designer Máirín Duffy will walk you through a case study of how to handle this using screenshots / demos, design artifacts, and decision points from the design of the new user interface for ChRIS, the open source, cloud-based medical image analysis platform created with Boston Children’s Hospital. Watch this talk to learn:

– Research techniques for working in an unfamiliar context
– What UX models are and why they matter
– How to develop a UX model
– What interface affordances are and how they reinforce your UX model

Who Cares It’s Free? Practicing UX in Open Source

Open source technology is now mainstream. Technologies large and small that impact people all over the world are powered by open source platforms, libraries, and backends. There’s an urgent problem, though: open source has become synonymous with shockingly poor user experience (UX), reducing its impact and adoption. In this talk, we’ll discuss the imperative need for UX in making software freedom ubiquitous and accessible to all. You’ll learn what forces in open source development have lead to its UX challenges, tips for making design work in an open source context, and how to make your project and/or community a more welcoming place for designers in order to better attract them! Let’s help people solve problems without becoming a product themselves, using open source.

A tour through open source creative tools

This is a lightning talk I’ve given from time to time at the Red Hat Summit. This particular performance has an opensource.com article to correspond with it.

Crafting Elegant User Experiences Involving Complex Storage Technologies

How do you create an elegant user experience that involves a complex storage system underneath? There are lessons to be learned from efforts to do so on two recent FLOSS projects: the Fedora installer’s storage selection interface, and GNOME’s disk utility Palimpsest. We would like to highlight some of the challenges faced in creating great user experiences with these interfaces and also discuss the implications of user experience for further improvement in storage-related development.