software
aquaris
Aquaris is a game dedicated to impart knowledge about renewable energy technologies and energy-saving measures to children of the fourth grade. Not only the game but also special controller devices have been developed.
magnet
Magnet visualizes entities of any kind and there similarity among each other. In the course of my degree dissertation, a prototype has been created and evaluated by conducting a think-aloud user test. The findings have been integrated in a follow-up interface. This new interface and the software behind is a still ongoing project.
foaf-o-matic
Evaluating the GUI of my colleague’s web application revealed more than 60 problems, including several critical ones. I have collected a best-of and their solutions, following Nielson’s Heuristics.
libSwb
LibSwb (pronounced libswib) will become a library for browsing the Semantic Web by constructing a global graph from distributed RDF documents and cut it down to an entity of interest and its environment, called the entity context. My part so far was mainly the theoretical background and the library architecture (interfaces, threading, modularization), less the graph construction, merging and pruning part. As the library gets more functional and stable, I intend to use magnet as a visualization on top of it. A short paper (four pages) with poster (300dpi) has been accepted for SWAP2008 (Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives).
hardware
keyboard gloves
As completion for a head-mounted display, I envisioned keyboard gloves, a complete replacement for a conventional keyboard. Letters are typed by touching fingers together, different combinations result in the simulation of different keystrokes. Finally, by using keyboard gloves, one could move around freely while operating a portable computer.
fingers
Is a platform, to exchange ideas and spread inspiration. It is made from a public touchscreen with drawing application, where students can share thoughts or opinions and get inspired by consuming creations of others.
media
drawings
See some drawings of mine.
ikarus
A stop-motion movie produced in the first year of my studies on the basis of the task “Make a movie about the topic bird”.
dream worlds — traumwelten
Some sleepless nights with a pencil, quite some sheets of paper and some pots of fruit tea — but finally, this small movie became something beautiful and unique and I ended up quite happy and proud 
. The video part and the coloration of the drawn part has been done by colleagues of mine.
» see the movie & more details »
photos
Photography is one of my big passions. Mostly focusing on details, a single object or idea, trying to convey a specific emotion, but always as close to the original as possible.
I recently started to publish my photos on flickr.com.
» see a selection »
» go to flickr.com »
web
integrating content and navigation
A general web interface is split up into two parts, navigation (e.g. a menu) and content, therefore, a user needs to relate the position of the content and the highlighted menu entry. To save space and ease the orientation of the user within a web site, I started to think about ways, to integrate content with navigation as zoomable UI and masked floating layer. To test this idea, I created a personal homepage back in 2005 mainly focused on my graphical and photographic producing and collected informal user feedback about the usability, but found it not sufficiently usable, as user complained about insufficient readability and to be irritated by the moving content. The project has been stopped, content not been updated ever since, but findings and experience have been incorporated into magnet.
» give it a try! (German content, guestbook inactive)»
education portal for Augsburg, Germany
www.bildung.augsburg.de is meant to be a central platform about all kind of information and events concerning education in and around Augsburg (Germany). I have been creating this website as a member of a team of three students on the basis of Typo3.
allevia
I have been working for allevia GmbH, Augsburg as web developer, software architect and engineer. I got in touch with usability evaluations and how usability aspects, joy-of-use and user experience can be main design principles. My mayor task over two years was to design and partially develop a proprietary CMS, focusing mainly on making it most flexible in terms of its application and to create an easy-to-use back-end for our customers. Thus, the CMS became a transparent framework with miscellaneous dynamic content components, which could be included in any page, on demand. In this way, we could create an non-obtrusive system, which does in no way restrict the freedom of the designer, to create each page of a website in a distinctive way, fine tuned to its content. In between, I additionally created several Flash widgets and animations, like those you can see on the company portal allevia.de, or created some designs myself and/or turned designs into CSS and assisted usability evaluations. Finally, the user test on magnet was performed by myself within the companies own usability laboratory.