fosdem2015

What kind of design?

Roy — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 22:23:22 +0000

Sub title

Designer job titles are many.

It helps to be specific about what kind of design expertise your open source project would benefit most from.

Branding? For when you want a more focussed, professional, appearance. Update the logo, define identity guidelines, design the project website.
Interaction design? Improve the workflows in your app. Optimise form layouts, decide what goes on each screen and how you get from one to the other.
Information architecture? Structure information, reorganise the (marketing, documentation, forum) sections of the website, define a content strategy and maybe some copy writing.
Interface design? Bootstrap only gets you that far. Bring the interaction design to life with clear and consistent styling.
…and then some, but these four make for a good first check.

Start tagging issues that you think would benefit from design input with a general “design” tag. You can then point the designer to those issues. This makes it a lot easier for the designer to tell where to start with what kind of design work to make a useful contribution.

This post triggered by Garth who did this quick check with somebody while chatting in the #opensourcedesign channel on IRC, which you should join too.

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osdesign

fosdem2015

FOSDEM 2015 slides

Roy — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 22:07:16 +0000

Sub title

Bootstrapping UX design in your open source project.

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The first open source design room at FOSDEM was a big success!

Thank you to all who attended my talk about bootstrapping ux design in your open source project. We did’t get the streaming setup working until later that day, but Lewis posted his notes. My notes from some of the other sessions are here.

Bootstrapping UX in your open source project – Roy Scholten – fosdem2015.odp

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osdesign

fosdem2015

Drupal

Pablo Cúbico – Every Pixel Hurts

Roy — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 15:07:52 +0000

Sub title

He heard it on the internet.

Is there even such a thing as open source ux? How can we open up the processes of design to open source.

Pablo bravely goes on to define what UX is. Obviously, it’s about the user. UX is the experience a user has while using a product. It can be measured, it can be improved and it can be developed and designed.

Then there is also good user experience, like with swimming flippers: symbiotic, prosthetic, uninterrupted, continuous.

UX itself is not a process, but it is an attribute of your product. UX design is a process.
UX is not (just) beauty
UX is not (just) UI. Visual, interaction design, user testing, performance, etc.
UX is not: dropping in an asset library and Bam: UX!

Open source UX sucks, why?

Only few designers participate
No clear path for contribution
Developers don’t know where to start
Disconnected lone rangers
(Visual) style differences
“Can I haz” feature requests
Everyone is a designer
Customise all the things
No proper tools
No T-shaped devs/designer hybrids
Code health (messy front end code)
No room for you
No visibility
Assumptions, assumptions
Resistance to change
…

Getting involved is mostly a social thing

Invite yourself to the party
Identify some measurable problems
Do some work to show your expertise
Be bold, we can always do less
Be humble
Start small

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osdesign

fosdem2015

Jan Holesovsky – LibreOffice Design Team

Roy — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 14:26:51 +0000

Sub title

Guiding principles for the LibreOffice design team

LibreOffice UX team doesn’t have a rigid structure. Channels are mailing lists, IRC, issue tracker and the git repository. The team has defined some concepts they strive to adhere to:

Provide a platform for conflict resolution

Consider all the different views that people have about what is “better”. First step is to try and find consensus. If that fails, search for usage statistics or existing patterns. Working on a HIG, documenting user interface standards. Using the Gnome HIG as the basis. In the end, a decision will be made and reverted if it really doesn’t work

Results oriented

The task is finished only when it gets included in the git repository. Implementation is key. Ideally, people push those code changes themselves. There is Gerrit, a code review system to help automate some of the work.

Effective communication

Avoid bike shedding. Most discussions start in the bug tracker. When a discussion gets out of control the discussion is moved to a faster, more realtime channel like IRC or G+ Hangout. There are also weekly G+ hangouts for two or three hours (6–7 participants).

Inclusive nature

Maybe you don’t even know you are already part of the design team. Weekly reports on UX changes that were implemented. Highlighting those efforts is very much appreciated.

Open to change

Changing or removing user interactions is hard, have to be careful about breaking existing workflows. Ongoing refinements and cleanups are very important to keep doing.

New in LibreOffice 4.4

Complete overhaul of the 1000+ icons. It’s the new default for OS X, available on other platforms as well
New approach to templates, now part of the start center.
Improved color selector and toolbars, style dropdowns

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libreoffice

fosdem2015

osdesign

Michael Demetriou – The challenges of open mobile design

Roy — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 13:27:52 +0000

Sub title

A preview of Nemo Mobile OS

Michael starts out with the famous “a camel is a horse designed by committee” analogy. But a camel is not a broken design, it is perfectly fit for the environment it lives in. Committee designs are usually more broken than the average camel.

The most iconic designs are works of a single person dictating what the end result is going to be. How does that apply to the open source bazaar? Have a grand vision to work towards, an idea for what the ideal, perfect version of your project looks like. Make decisions that work toward that vision. Some trade-offs have to be made to keep the community engaged, but as a designer you have to defend your right to reject seemingly good ideas that do not work towards the vision.

Make sure that the whole team speaks the same (design) language. New people will get the same advice, even if the lead designer is not around at that specific moment.

Michael then demonstrated the Nemo Mobile OS that can be installed on Android devices. A main feature is the configurable, app specific header bar. One of the apps functioned as a style guide showcasing available interaction design patterns.

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Hollie Lubbock – UI design for open data

Roy — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 12:42:32 +0000

Sub title

Using design to facilitate understanding.

How design can help communicate open data

If you’re not good at number crunching, open data is not easy to interpret and learn from. Visualising it with maps and graphs makes it much more accessible. The data has to be good from the start though.

Can infographics save lives? Probably yes. Florence Nightingale mapping causes of death. London Underground map…

Strive for simplicity and clarity
Allow users to make up their own mind
Inspire people to create something with the data

Who is using open data?

Cultural sector is a big adopter of open data and semantic web technologies. For example museums, they have a responsibility to not only store the data somewhere, but to also make it accessible to a larger audience.

The data sets drive the collections searches on their own sites. Social media integrations make for fun interactive applications. For example, see Dimensions of art by @jradavenport.

What’s next?

Common thesauri being developed. Hack days to get more people involved within limited budgets. Considering to make open data a requirement for government funding.

Museums typically create guided tours, which are pre-selected and pre-arranged. This was not always the case. In earlier times, the walls were full with a lot of paintings all over the place and you get to . Open data allows to recreate some of that choose-your-own-adventure approach.

Hollie then showed some of her work. A museum project where the whole team worked in an open, glass space at the museum where the audience could see how a web team worked. Even posting the designs up on the pinboards for everybody to look at and give feedback on.

We should be helping people to engage with open data and data a in general as much as possible. Design can help lower the barriers.

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open data

osdesign

fosdem2015

Björn Balasz – The problem of representativity, challenges of user centred work in FLOSS projects.

Roy — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 09:59:55 +0000

Sub title

A proposal for turning passive users into active participants

Björn discusses some of the issues he sees in open source design work and will propose a way to fix.

You want to create great products? Then focus on your users. Problem is there is no one single typical user to make happy. There are many different people with different expectations. So you can’t ask them directly. Instead we introduce an abstraction in the form of personas and other artefacts (vision pieces, testing results, style guides). These abstractions are necessary because otherwise you’d be solving a problem with too many variables.

What’s the problem in open source here? There is no research data on the users! If you don’t know who your users are, you can’t abstract them into personas and thus you cannot create an optimised product for them.

An idea for a solution. Because IRC, bug trackers are not the right tools for taking care of your relationships with your users.

Introducing User Relationship Management.

You need to seduce people to participate in improving open source software. What if your software would actively thank you for using it and provide a link to find out why you are thanked. This would start a quick survey that asks people to rate the software. A quick initial round of feedback is achieved.

Offer adequate options for participation. After the first single input feedback, after some time add another prompt asking to fill out maybe a 5 question survey.

It’s about slowly turning a passive user into an active participant.

There would also have to be a backend to this to analyse and review the input and use it to model your personas and evolve them over time.

Sign user-rights.org and help this become real!

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fosdem2015

osdesign

Jan Borchardt – Building the Open Source Design Community

Roy — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 09:08:45 +0000

Sub title

What’s out there in open source design.

An overview of what’s happening in open source design today by @Jancborchardt

Sharing the knowledge

Large open source projects have more resources and are sharing their expertise. Learn from them:

Gnome design wiki is a big and well structured design reference
Mozilla UX blog, read about usability research in India for example. Bigger projects have more design resources
Drupal usability group
WordPress design updates with weekly meetings
Ubuntu design blog, about usability testing in China for example

Sharing methods

Two strategies for getting usability work integrated in existing developer workflows:

Define a set of UX related tags you can use in the bug tracker. Best to keep it simple and start with one catch-all “Design” tag instead of breaking it out in too specific subtags
Build a design team. Create a channel for design related discussion. Existing channels on IRC are #Gnome-design, #drupal-usability #ux (Mozilla) #wikimedia-design, #owncloud-design, #opensourcedesign

The million dollar question pops up early: where to find designers for our open source projects?

Existing initiatives

DesignOpen.org
OpenUsability.org
Libre Graphics Meeting (which is more art, design & typography focussed)
OpenDesign.io is just a survey at this point.
Open-Karma.com
Creatives Unite
Beautiful open, curating good looking pages for javascript libraries, mostly
DesignOpenSrc is building a list of designers willing to work on open source projects
Open Source Designers group on Github

Jan is also working with universities, introducing some open source projects to the students and having them work on it. A low barrier way to get new people involved.

Meet and collaborate

Get together, meet each other face to face and get the cross-project exchange started. Share experience and resources. Today is exciting, the first designer meetup at FOSDEM. Lets get busy!

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osdesign

fosdem2015

How to make design in open source happen

Roy — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 22:36:48 +0000

Sub title

Two rough draft lists.

Designers that want to get involved in open source projects:

Don’t burst through the door and start yelling that you’re all doing it wrong. That might be true, but things were not made to suck on purpose.
Instead, ease in. Find out where the daily conversation happens. Join and start asking questions. “Why is this working like this?”
Usability tests are an ideal way to show which things need improvement.
Write a review of the software. Highlight what you think works well and what could be improved.
Have a user centred process. Stick to it. Show the work, take people along on the journey towards a solution.
Small teams get things done. Take in all the feedback, pick out the useful bits but stay true to your vision.
Have a vision.
Make sure you care. But not too much.

Open source projects that want to involve designers:

Not only code is gold.
Design is not the surface layer over a bunch of code. Allow people to dig in, have some patience with what may seem like silly questions.
Do you know who the software is for? And what those people want to achieve with it? The answers to these two questions are required foundations or effective design can not happen.
Ask for reviews from your users (or: which support questions keep popping up in your bug tracker?)
If every feature is important then nothing is important. Design is about making trade-offs, so prioritise. Making this thing easier to do will make those other things less obvious.
Interaction designers create the different paths through the software. Information architects organise and structure the necessary words, sentences and other content objects. User interface designers make things look consistent and create the right visual hierarchies. Usability specialists will show you what your users experience. What kind of design expertise would your project benefit from most?
Be prepared to write the code that implements somebody else’s ideas.

Yup, plotting my FOSDEM talk in the open :)

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open source

design

fosdem2015