Jan Dittrich

Design Researcher * he|they

Jan is a design researcher and anthropologist. After working for USEEDS° and Wikimedia Germany e.V. they now work on their PhD at the University of Siegen.

I focus on researching user needs with qualitative methods. How I do this I have written down in a little online book: urbook.fordes.de/. I also use statistical methods, surveys, usability testing and heuristic analysis. I would like to expand my skills and knowledge of participatory design in open source projects. I have used PD in some projects at Wikimedia. I have a solid understanding of UX design and its principles. I have experience in working with design systems and created a small one myself for Wikimedia Germany’s donation page. I do some programming myself (JavaScript, Python, some Clojure and R) and I worked with and in Open Source communities, so I have a good understanding of open source software creation.

To schedule a coaching session with Jan Dittrich please send an email to [email protected].

jan's recent work

How To Test Software For Usability And Usefulness When You Haven’t Finished Writing The Code

How do you find out if the software you are building is usable and useful for others? We’ve written this blog post about how to address this challenge! It is often easiest to try out the software when it’s been fully built, but this is also when any mistakes are most difficult to fix because so much has already been coded. This is a concern and a challenge for product managers, developers and UX designers alike.

Launching USER: Findings and Recommendations for Scientific and Research Open Source

Usable Software Ecosystem Research (USER) is a Sloan Foundation-supported research initiative that explores how open source scientific and research software (SROSS) teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects. To read more about this project please check out Blog #1, Blog #2, our project website, and open repo.