LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ELC-E Europe 2014

Developers tend to think of software in the same way we hang our jeans to dry: inside out. And with good reason: they face the enormous challenge of building software that works. In order to succeed, they must focus on the technology, and not so much on what happens at the periphery of it. Interaction designers deal with a different challenge: they must build software that makes sense to the people who use it. In order to succeed, they must think of software from the outside in, starting from its users, what they want and what they need. This talk is the story of how the Yocto Project built Toaster, its latest application, from the outside in, focusing on its users, what they want and what they need. It will show how user-centered design techniques can be adapted to the particularities of the embedded Linux community, and how they can be applied to help improve embedded Linux tools.