Thomas Lansing

UI to UX and product leadership for Nyxt web browser

• My initial role was user interface designer for the project.
• The exciting thing about Nyxt for me was the huge potential for wide adoption, paired with a deep well of usability issues I could help with.
• I saw that Nyxt could be doing much more to help people with a better understanding of users.

About the project:

• Nyxt is a research project turned small business,
  sponsored by the legendary NLnet Foundation.

• Customers are keyboard obsessed programmers and researchers.
• These customers can wear several hats, as open source contributors, programmers, and users.
• While onboarding, I made some libraries to help our customers create thier own themes on the platform.

I observed the product suffering from feature confusion and fundamental interface issues.

• 20+ interviews and a survey later, I was able to make a compelling case to our dev team and narrow our scope to one single market (programmers who love Emacs) for the next year.
• My work saved the developers months of effort and kept them focused on some key architectural releases

My research had some unexpected and impactful benefits.

• As our grant funding cycle concluded, I conceived and conducted Lean style experiments with our customers to determine the future business model(s) for Nyxt.
• My research demonstrated how our users would be happy to donate, and pay for extensions from our core dev team.
• The resulting donation based business model increased the always important LCV metric, enough to pay for 10% of the development budget (ongoing).
• Today the browser has a steadily growing user base (30,000+) with about 35 new downloads each day.