Author: Jon McGreevy
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Case Study | Pascal Febvre at Frugal EDA
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Pascal Febvre’s software could simulate superconducting circuits. What it couldn’t do was install. With help from Commons Caretakers’ Eric Herman, a suite of twenty-odd interdependent programs that only really built on a Mac became a one-click download for seven platforms. “It takes easily six months, one year to get used to it. And you spend…
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Case Study | Morgan Ava at Ricochet Refresh
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Morgan has spent years making sure nobody can tell who you’re talking to on Ricochet Refresh. Whether anyone could actually work the thing was a much harder question to answer from the inside. A UX review through Commons Caretakers answered it, not very kindly. “I’ve been staring at this thing for years and I know…
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Case Study | Thomas Schellekens at Qryptr
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Thomas Schellekens spent eight years building an encrypted messenger on his own. By the end, the thing keeping him up wasn’t a bug or a soldering problem. It was a much quieter worry: did anyone else actually think this was worth doing? He came to Commons Caretakers for a UX audit of Qryptr. What he…
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Case Study | Tracy Gardner at Flock XR
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Finding the right expertise is hard when you’re a small open-source team. Dr Tracy Gardner, the computer scientist behind browser-based 3D creative coding tool Flock XR, needed UX design and software testing skills the team couldn’t cover internally. Through Commons Caretakers, she got both — a UX reviewer who spotted problems the team would have…
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Case Study | James Smith at Manyfold
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James is the developer behind Manyfold, a self-hosted, federated application for managing and sharing 3D-print files. It’s a bit like running your own Thingiverse where the instances can talk to each other across the fediverse. It’s the kind of project the digital commons is built on: useful, opinionated, run by one person who cares deeply,…