Hello, as Ian Jackson kindly requested, here are some links to the contents I touched in my talk: First of all, the paper behind this talk that I prepared for LinuxTag 2004. It's more complex that I would like it, but it's got exactly the contents of this talk, much more expanded. Enrico Zini, "Zen and the art of Free Software: know your user, know yourself", proceedings of LinuxTag 2004, http://www.free-it.de/archiv/talks/paper-10235/ or http://people.debian.org/~enrico/talks/2004linuxtag/zen-paper.html Then the book of Alan Cooper, that I vastly quoted. It's a really nice read, full of insightful stuff and funny insider's tales about the new economy bubble and how there were so many people making so many stupid choices :) Alan Cooper, „The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity“, Sams Publishing, 1999 Here's a nice article about personas, from Cooper's newsletter: http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2001_07/perfecting_your_personas.htm Nielsen's euristics, with "lintian -I" explainations: Jakob Nielsen, „Ten Usability Euristics“, http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html And by consequence, Nielsen's useit.com website, in which various interesting articles end up. Yet not all of them should necessarily be taken literally: http://www.useit.com Then one classic of the literature of ergonomics/usability/design, and a monument to the great way Norman handled its frustration with doors and telephones: Donald Norman, „The Design of Everyday Things“, Basic Books And the paper behind the magical number 7±2, with all the interesting tale on the experiment they made to measure it, applying Shannon's laws to humans: George A. Miller, „The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information“, 1956, Psycological Review n.63 pp. 81-91, http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html Fabian Fagerholm just suggested me this very nice collection of current patterns from/for user interfaces. It is to be used as a way of thinking about them and understanding them rather than a source of pre-cooked ideas, just the same as in the Design Patterns we all (hopefully?) know: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/patterns/ Lastly, there's also the survey I made on Debian users which is an interesting read, although there are no particular techniques explained there: http://people.debian.org/~enrico/survey/survey.php It's 8 of them: don't read them all at the same time! ;) Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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