SUSE Labs Conference 2020 - The Psychology of Everyday Computers

At every layer of computing, our work interacts with humans. From graphical desktop environments, text editors, command line interfaces, log outputs, error messages, even to api design and header files. Each of these components all are used by humans to allow us to further develop, extend and build systems.

But humans are "messy" - they make mistakes, they think about things in funny ways. Thankfully the schools of psychology exist and have been studying humans and how they operate for many years. This research has helped to create industrial design and interaction principles that we can use to make systems that are native for a human to interact with.

In this talk, we'll explore human interaction psychology, and use a number of examples from opensource to highlight good and bad interactions, but also how we as engineers can construct and design better software for humans to use.