Fritzing — irlabs.nl

From 2007 onward I was the interface designer and usability evangelist for Fritzing, the open-source application that lets designers, artists and makers move from a breadboard sketch to a finished, producible circuit board.

Fritzing is a software application that helps designers, artists and other makers document, prototype and produce their own electronic circuit boards.
Where most electronic design software is difficult to use, expensive and aimed at engineers, Fritzing is open source, free, and built to be genuinely easy and friendly, especially for people new to electronics. From the end of 2007 onward I was the interface designer and usability evangelist.

Throughout the design and development process we made a lot of paradigm shifts, always in favour of the user. Designing printed circuit boards is a complex system leaning on many dependencies, so usability wasn’t a nice-to-have: it is vital to the project, since it determines whether a user with limited knowledge of electronics succeeds or not.

The premise of Fritzing is that sketching in electronics begins on a breadboard. Physical prototyping tools like Arduino have come a long way and already let non-engineers turn ideas into working interactive sketches quickly.
However the biggest issue with the prototypes in this stage is that they stay raw and fragile. This is where Fritzing comes in: it lets the designer move to the next stage and turn an individual circuit into a finished PCB in the shape they want, robust enough for a permanent installation or even small-batch production.

Over the project we moved the application itself from a Java/Eclipse environment to C++ with Qt, and from an entry tool that depended on Eagle to a standalone application producing its own Gerber files.
The images here show some of the design work and the process we went through as a team.