Design at DevDays

Welcome to the post Qt DevDays 2013 edition of the UX Blog.  I suspect that many of you who follow this blog also attended DevDays and I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did.  I met a lot of great people, saw some interesting demos and presentations and even gave a few talks that seemed to hold people’s attention for the full time slot.  All in all, a pretty great week.

This was the first year that the UX group participated in a Human Factors booth and based on the booth traffic, it appears that many of you are becoming more interested in the User Experience design aspect of application development.   If this is true, it’s a win for everyone, especially the end users of our software. It is also possible that you were just interested in the cool demos we were showing, illustrating new trends in human-computer interaction.   We had several gesture based demos in our booth, notably a version of Google Earth that was controlled by the Leap Motion camera (thanks to the folks at Leap for coming out to show that) and the latest incarnation of our Jarvis / Anita demo (see my earlier Perception is Everything blog entry).

The base work we did on the Anita demo showed both voice and gesture interactions.  We primarily used gesture to move through slides and voice to activate other commands, such as opening files and turning on our virtual laser pointer.  This was the subject of one of my talks, “Developing Natural User Interfaces (NUI) in Qt," which was well attended and had some lively questions at the end.  You can expect to hear more about Anita and NUIs in general, in a future post.

As DevDays continues to grow, it’s great to present exhibits and talks that reflect not only how to do things in Qt, but what we can and should be doing for our users.  It would be great to see a Design track next year with a full set of sessions.  Maybe someone reading this will be a new face in the crowd at DevDays in 2014?  I hope to see you then!