2025-09-26 –, Social Hub Main Room
Contributing to GUI tools can be a daunting process: it's not very easy to test things on Qubes OS, the whole OS stack is enormous, and the very idea of designing an interface is quite scary to many developers. It does not have to be that bad, though! In this talk, I will briefly introduce the testing tools Qubes OS has that can be useful for GUI development, explain how to find our design patterns for more consistent GUI applications, and give a brief introduction to Design for Hackers - that is, how to make GUI tools that don't suck without reading a stack of books on design and human brain.
Nobody can become a great interface designer in half an hour - but there are many typical pitfalls developers fall into when trying to make a workable user interface. In this talk, I will show some techniques to avoid them, demonstrate on Qubes OS examples how we ourselves fell into some of them - and how we worked to do better. I will also give an introduction to Qubes OS testing tools that can help develop and test GUI tools without testing them on your own live system.
Qubes OS UX Lead.
After a varied collection of careers ranging from translation to data analysis, I currently am a Python programmer and UI/UX designer working on making Qubes OS more usable for everyone.