Category: Launchpad
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Making usability part of the development process
For the first year and a half in Canonical I worked with the amazing Launchpad team, with the ambitious goal of building a new user interface, introducing AJAX in an established code base and rolling it all out on time. While all of that was overwhelming in itself, what was more important to me was…
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Moving to Ubuntu One
After a year and a half in the User Experience team at Canonical, I’ve decided to move to the Ubuntu One team. It’s been an amazing experience to be part of that team but I’ve been missing doing development on a regular basis a lot lately, so I’ve decided to move into a role where…
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Why test driven development rocks
All projects in Canonical have a strong focus on testing. From all of them, I think Bazaar ranks the highest on obsesiveness on testing. As a drive-by contributor, it always felt like a very high entry barrier, and deterred me from getting into complicated changes. It was only after I bit the bullet and got…
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Research results on Launchpad icons
Following up on our survey on icons in Launchpad, Charline Poirier provides us with the outcome: Edit : High level of understanding, but a strong association with “attention”, “warning”, and “danger”. Might be worth modifying colour or shape to distance the icon from that interpretation. Merge : Reasonable understanding of “merge”. However, participants were not entirely sure if the icon referred to the state…
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Improving Launchpad icons, round 2
Following up on my last post about user testing icons, it has been incredibly successful! We’ve had over 100 responses, and are now going through the data to put together a summary. I will post information on our findings as soon as we finish the work. In the mean time, Charline Poirier, who is in…
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Help Launchpad get better icons
We’re trying to improve the icons we have in Launchpad so they’re more usable across different cultures and types of users, and our first step is to do some user testing on our current icons. The Canonical User Experience team has set up a survey to gather information on how users see our icons, so…
Martin Albisetti
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Launchpad is now fully open source
As promised, Launchpad has been fully open sourced (as opposed to the initial idea, nothing has been held back). Get it now, fix your favorite pet bug, and improve tens thousands of people’s experience. Mark Shuttleworth really deserves a lot of praise for this bold and brave move, open sourcing not only the code, but…
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Launchpad AJAX changing user habits
Check out what happened when AJAX bug tags editing landed in April: Note that since Launchpad has the edge/production split, so the changes in the graphs are less drastic since a set of users start interacting with new code before others.
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Working at Canonical, 5 months later
A week ago I started going through my blog’s logs, and realized that I’d had a jump in visits from Google. Digging a little bit deeper into it, I realized that a lot of people seem to be searching for “working at canonical” phrased in different ways. From what I can gather, it’s split up…
Martin Albisetti's blog 