On Friday, 17 October, it was that time of the year again. I had skipped the event for the last two years, this year I wanted to spend three exciting and inspiring days in Leipzig at the Developer Open Space 2014. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend Friday’s workshops. After nearly six hours travelling by car combined with a busy workday before, I fell into my hotel bed pretty much immediately and pretty much exhausted. But the following Saturday, I was up early as a bird and ready to attend the session planning.

Torsten Weber, co-organizer of the Open Space, pointed out in advance that there would be many newcomers this year. I was hoping this might bring new ideas and a breeze of fresh air. Others feared that old topics might come up again. Although that did not seem to be an issue, the session planning was a bit chewy this year.

Altogether, mainly subjects from the field of development were presented. Creative techniques, Docker as well as rights and obligations of freelancers where some of the topics. Technical issues such as wearables and smarthome, sensors for autonomous robots and kinect 2.0 were also represented. Development itself was a subject in the introduction of Angular JS, Haskell or the Rails Disco. I myself held a session presenting XamlBoard – Centigrade’s tool for managing Xaml resources. A complete overview of all topics can be found here.

Since my last visit the .NET Open Space war renamed Developer Open Space to take into account the variety of topics besides .NET. The aim of a technology-independent “Unconference” was definitely achieved this year: A little shy and aware of the crowd, a guy came forward and revealed himself as a Java developer. He was accepted into the family – unlike Frank, who asked for help with WCF performance problems and raised a big laugh. Nevertheless, Frank’s problem was discussed in an own session. The following sections show my impressions of the sessions I visited.

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This article is currently only available in German language.

‚We always seek dedicated students looking for an interesting thesis or internship project.‘ – this call can be found when browsing the Centigrade website for job and career opportunities. A call that is hard to resist if you are an upcoming graduate student. Especially when you – like in my case – consider the many given connections between Centigrade’s north-western branch and the many different universities, academies and colleges of the Ruhr area.

As you can easily see, this opportunity led me here… and now I am working on my master thesis based on a cooperation between Centigrade and the ‘Interactive Systems’ chair of University Duisburg-Essen that combines both areas of expertise and professions:

‘Development of a Gamification Design in Consideration of different Play-Personas’

Starting point of my thesis will be running a quantitive survey based on Bartle’s ‘Player Types’ to identify relevant users and their motivators for playful environments. In combination with additional demographic data like age, gender and profession this should result in one or more hypothetical user types (so called ‘personas’) for our use-case. In the following step, these gamification personas could be addressed by a specific designed gamification concept. The use-case of the project will be a mobile app prototype in the context of Energy Transition that should ideally lead to more sustainability in the user’s everyday life. That sounds like an exciting project with actual matter to me!

To those of you, who are also interested in working on their thesis in collaboration with a Centigrade project or who have gathered own ideas that could fit into the wide field of user interface architecture: Feel free to contact Centigrade via e-mail at jobs@centigrade.de .

By the way: A deeper look into my thesis’ survey, the following gamification design process and the prototype development will be soon available and regularly updated on my Instagram account (#appshamrock).

What is aesthetics and how can we determine it? Can usability tests be performed remotely to save time and money? And what happens to a Facebook profile when its user dies? These and many more interesting topics about human-computer interaction, user experience and usability where subject of this year’s conference Mensch und Computer 2014 (Human and Computer 2014) which took place in the premises of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. read more…

Times have changed. Back in the time, during my school days, before smartphones flooded the market, I felt naked without my watch. This most important accessory was also some kind of status symbol and could never be missing. I looked at it probably a hundred times a day, consciously or unconsciously. Every morning when I left the house and had forget the watch at home for some reason, I walked around all day with the feeling, that something important is missing.

Several years later, I got my first smartphone. read more…

Videogames are a great enrichment to our cultural environment. With advancing technology, video games become more realistic and engaging. Unfortunately, texts, sculptures, pictures, music and movies do not have the same potential letting the recipient immerse into another world (at least not without drugs). For this reason, game development has become an absolute dream job for many people. However, the conditions and requirements for that job are not as great as media suggest – at least in Germany.

In this article I will compare game- and software development showing that developing “serious” software applications can be as fulfilling as game development.

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Icon design is my day-to-day business, ranging from universally applicable Home icons to very special icons for the wiring of electric relays in substations. Recently I learned that interpreters also use symbols to be able to “sketch” the meaning of spoken words quickly and recall them later. I used this occasion to take a step back and look at other helpful uses for symbols.
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This article is only available in German language.

In December Centigrade carried out an evaluation of the racing game “Need for Speed: Rivals” for Electronic Arts – one of the biggest publishers and developers of computer- and videogames. Focus of the evaluation was the recording and analysis of the game experience under consideration of different situations in the game.

Based on their vast experience regarding the evaluation of computer and videogames, the pilot study was conducted by the Centigrade team of the North-Western branch under direction of Joerg Niesenhaus in close collaboration with the Deutsche Sporthochschule in Cologne. The Deutsche Sporthochschule runs a state-of-the-art interaction lab and contributed expertise in the evaluation of interactive entertainment via Dr. Carsten Moeller.
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Some new e-mail clients have been introduced recently. Unibox, Airmail, Mail Pilot and others feature convincing visual design, increased joy of use and intriguing interaction concepts.
In my opinion, the person-centered approach of Unibox is very promising. Instead of being organized in a folder hierarchy, e-mails are sorted based on contacts (friends, colleagues, etc.), which results in speedier e-mail retrieval. In addition, one almost forgets that one is dealing with e-mails – it feels more like a conversation between two people. I wonder why nobody has thought of this approach earlier.

The redesigns have inspired me to have closer look at e-mail clients and propose some additional concepts.

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A few months ago we discussed the challenges and potentials of gamification and the process of implementing gamification methods. We pointed out that an extensive analysis of the existing processes and well adapted gamification mechanisms increase the chances of success – for instance to optimize the efficiency of a process or raise the employee satisfaction.

In our current blog article we dive into the widely debated industry 4.0 theme and focus on the application area of industrial production and the role gamification methods could play within this area, and also which specific requirements have to be fulfilled to enable the implementation of playful elements.

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This article is currently only available in German language