Archive for the ‘currentwork’ Category

If you’ve ever had to create Ubuntu or Canonical related design materials, chances are you had a look at the Brand Guidelines, which, until now, have only existed in the form of bulky PDFs. Those days are over, as we happily introduce the brand new Ubuntu Brand Guidelines site, where you can read the guidelines [...]

For the multi-monitor design project, we have been making use of prototypes to develop and test some of the finer interactions of the system. One such crucial element is the reveal of the Launcher, particularly as we are exploring having a Launcher on each display. The motivation for making the Launcher available from any display [...]

Over the past few months we have been working on improving the multi-monitor experience in Ubuntu. We took the opportunity at UDS in November to get some feedback on a prototype, which shows how we are planning to develop the multi-monitor experience over the next few cycles: Here is a short video of the prototype [...]

Last night I watched “Press Pause Play” which in it’s own words is a film about fear, hope and digital culture. If you’ve not heard the talk surrounding the movie one of the trailers is below and we’ll catch up once you’ve … well … caught up Good huh? The interesting thing about Press Pause [...]

Recently we hired an external consultant to compare the usability of 2 email clients: Thunderbird and Evolution. I have taken some highlights from the report to compose this blog. Setting of the usability session The sessions took place in early June at the Canonical Office in London. Thirty participants were recruited. All of them used [...]

When we introduced the new overlay scrollbars we knew it was a bold decision and we were expecting some critics because of the use cases we didn’t support. As hoped, we had a lot of very useful feedback. Most of the people very liked this innovation and understood our need to be consistent to our [...]

We all know Ubuntu is great, but we want even more people to know just how great. With this in mind, we thought we’d give the visitors of ubuntu.com the tools to spread the word about Ubuntu. As of today, you can see Tweet and Like buttons on some of the key pages of the [...]

Every 6 months the Ubuntu journey starts anew. Those of us entering yet another cycle assume that this all makes sense to the outside world but I like to post up dates on the wall in the office and write a blog post to give those new to the project, and some not so new, [...]

First and last impressions of Unity were that it was quite user-friendly, and pleasing in its design and ease of learning. The majority of participants left the session with very positive feelings and were looking forward to Unity’s release so they could download it. In short, participants in this testing session were considerably more positive [...]

 I have just completed sessions of usability testing of Thunderbird. This time, I had the pleasure of working with Andreas Nilsson, who came to London to observe the sessions. It was very useful to get his feedback and to work collaboratively with him on the analysis and implications of the findings. In addition to [...]