June 16, 2021

What is UCD? The User-Centered Design Process

UCD is one of the term that gets thrown around alot recently, with businesses putting more emphasis on UX in their products. But just because it’s used a lot, doesn’t mean everybody fully understands what that is.

User-centered design process

Each phase of the user-centered design process focuses on users and their needs. It’s an iterative process, which means that designers go back to certain phases, again and again, to refine their designs and create the best possible product for their intended users.

At the core of the user-centered design process is a deep empathy for the user. It’s not just about what a product does for a user, it’s about how the experience of interacting with the design makes the user feel. 

Here are the key steps in the user-centered design process: 

  • Understand how the user experiences the product. You want to know how users will engage with your design, as well as the environment or context in which they’ll experience the product. Understanding this requires a lot of research, like observing users in action and conducting interviews, which we’ll explore more later.
  • Specify the user’s needs. Based on your research, figure out which user problems are the most important to solve. 
  • Design solutions. Come up with lots of ideas for designs that can address the user problems you’ve identified. Then, start to actually design those ideas! 
  • Evaluate the solutions you designed against the user’s needs. Ask yourself, does the design I created solve the user’s problem? To answer this question, you should test the product you designed with real people and collect feedback. 
ucd

Notice how the arrows in the diagram indicate circular movement. This illustrates the iterative quality of the user-centered design process. Designers go back to earlier phases of the process to refine and make corrections to their designs. With the user-centered design process, you’re always working to improve the user’s experience and address the problems that users are facing!

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June 14, 2021

Entry-level UX designers, what do they do exactly?

As you start out on your path to becoming a UX designer, you’re probably curious about the actual work your new career might involve. In this reading, you can explore the different responsibilities that entry-level UX designers commonly take on during a project. You’ll also review the differences between generalist, specialist, and T-shaped UX designers.

Responsibilities of an entry-level UX designer

As an entry-level UX designer, you’ll have a lot of exciting opportunities to gain experience. When you first start out, you’ll probably take on a lot of different roles and responsibilities. 

graphic of a person using a laptop, with various icons surrounding them indicating UX design skills
Icons include user research (a tablet with magnifying glass over it) Information architecture (a series of 3 colored, numbered bars) Wireframing (a graphic of a wireframe) Protoyping (a graphic of a desktop monitor with protoype of mobile device on screen) Visual design (a mobile phone next to paint swatches) Effective communication (a graphic of two people talking)
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June 14, 2021

The Product Design Process (or Cycle, to be exact)

Every new product, whether it’s an app or a physical object, follows a specific set of steps that take it from the first spark of an idea to the release of the final product. This is called the product design cycle, and it has five stages: brainstorm, define, design, test, and launch. Depending on where you work, the exact names of each stage might be a little different, but the overall process is generally the same.

graphic showing the product development lifecycle (represented by a circle)

In this reading, you’ll explore the product design cycle and how UX design fits into each stage. As you might have guessed, UX designers are most engaged during the design stage of the product design cycle, but they work closely with team members — like researchers, product managers, and engineers — throughout the entire life cycle. 

As a product moves through the development life cycle, the team might need to spend longer working in one stage than in others, or repeat certain stages based on feedback. The success of each stage depends on the previous stage’s completion, so it’s important to do them in order. 

Check out each of the five stages of the product design cycle!

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May 1, 2021

Using Putty generated private keys with Guacamole

If you’re trying to use a private key with Guacamole to connect to your server but it doesn’t work, chances are you’re using one of the keys generated with Puttygen. Guacamole only accepts RSA compliant keys, so you’d want to do that.

image
Opens your PPK with Puttygen again, and go to Convesions > Export OpenSSH key (the first option).
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Then open the content of that new file with a text editor, copy and paste it into Guacamole private key field and it should work.
April 15, 2021

Integrating Jellyfin with Heimdall: just what the heck is the ‘Password (secret token)’?

So you’re probably in the process of integrating Jellyfin with Heimdall, and you’re stumped by this little field in the Add application screen in Heimdall:

image 4

Just what the heck are we supposed to put in there? Neither the username nor password of my Jellyfin account works here, just what the heck is this ‘Password (Secret token)’ thing that Heimdall is asking for?

The more tech savvy among you probably have already figured it out, but if you’re an idiot like me, you’re gonna waste a few rage inducing hours searching for it on the Internet to no avail, nobody on the Interweb seems to know what it is. Well I figured it out, and I’m gonna tell you.

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February 24, 2021

Hosting my own Netflix on an ancient Mac Mini 2011

F118CfL

(This is not really a guide or a tutorial, you may get some tips on how to setup a reverse proxy to access your server from your own domain, but if you’re here looking for a full blown media server setup guide, you’re in the wrong place)

I’m sure I’m not the first to have setup a little media server at home serving all kinds of, um, totally legal content that you obtained from the Internet. But accessing it outside of your home has always been something that I never got around to do.

Until this Tet holiday that is.

Since I had to spend like 4-5 days at my inlaws during these times, I knew Netflix alone ain’t gonna cut it, especially since I’ve pretty much watched everything that worth watching on it. I need to be able to access my quality contents that were sitting under my TV in my bedroom, a hundred kilometer away.

phimhub jelly
Jellyfin running perfectly on my inlaws’ smart TV

Anywho, enough rambling. You want to know how I set it up. Read on.

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February 16, 2021

Google Drive File Stream alternative for Linux

A cloud drive is more or less an essential part of everybody’s workflow these days. For those utilizing Google’s service like I am, then Drive File Stream (now renamed to Google Drive, again) is one of the first installer you run whenever you setup a new Windows or Mac OS system. Its biggest appeal comparing to a traditional sync client like Mega.nz or Dropbox is that it doesn’t take up a shit ton of space on your own hard drive, because the files aren’t actually synchronized with your computer. They are only downloaded on an on-access basis. Now this is not something that most people who’s using Google’s 15GB drive would be concerned about, but for people like me who’s approaching 4TB, local synchronization is pretty much out of the question.

Google’s lack of attention for a native Linux client for Drive File Stream has always been one of the major hurdles to people like me who were looking to migrate my entire workflow to Linux (along with Adobe’s apps, but the recent rise of web based design tools like Figma has greatly mitigate my need on Adobe). Luckily, like everything else with Linux, when a multi billion dollar corporation fails to provide a tool, the open source community steps in and save the day.

Introducing google-drive-ocamlfuse, more or less the closest you can get to Drive File Stream on Linux

February 4, 2021

Bootstrap Studio 5.5.1 running on Linux

Just installed Manjaro KDE Plasma today after Deepin 20 totally let me down. One of my worries when switching to Manjaro is software availability (or lack thereof). Most pre-packaged softwares on Linux comes in either Debian flavor (.deb) or Red Hat flavor (.rpm), and Manjaro is well, neither. It’s Arch-based.

Luckily, its user repo is pretty massive. I was able to find almost everything I wanted on AUR (Arch User Repository), and pretty much everything is up-to-date, unlike Deepin’s shitty ‘App Store’. Proprietary softwares however, are harder to come by.

One of them is Bootstrap Studio.

I was super relieved however, to learn that the developer chose to release the linux binary as an AppImage as opposed to DEB or RPM. Which means it’s super convenient to work with.

Since it’s electron-based, it basically uses the same binaries for Windows, OS X and Linux. So if you wanted to, you can replace app.asar with the same file from another platform and it would just works™.

Why would you want to do that? Well if you’re here then chances are you already know why.

What you basically want to do is grab the AppImage, run it with the flag --appimage-extract, which will extract everything to a folder called squashfs-root. Just go in there, replace the file, then repack everything with the command appimagetool -v squashfs-root and you will have what you want.

Just don’t tell anybody about this, m’kay?