On Design Thinking

According to Patnaik (2009), Design Thinking is "any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look." The term was already used as early as 1987 by Rowe in his eponymous book in an architectural context and has lately become popular through research done at Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner… Continue reading On Design Thinking

What is ›Usability‹?

Earlier this year, I submitted a research paper about a concept called usability-based split testing1 to a web engineering conference (Speicher et al., 2014). My evaluation involved a questionnaire that asked for ratings of different usability aspects—such as informativeness, readability etc.—of web interfaces. So obviously, I use the word “usability” in that paper a lot;… Continue reading What is ›Usability‹?