User and Social Experience Design
How can front-end user interaction and user experience designers get more involved in open source development projects?
I’m all for open source software; I’m typing this blog post in WordPress, an open source blogging platform. My laptop in the bag next to me is running Ubuntu an open source operating system and OpenOffice an open source word processing and spreadsheet suite. There are thousands of great open source applications and platforms out there that have been far more thoughtfully designed, critically tested and thus functional and reliable than many commercial software products.
However as I see it the contributing side of the open source world is really only for developers, coders, programmers. The task of designing, implementing and integrating features into an open source product is shared by the community of developers around that product. If you want to contribute, write some code and check it into the repository.
Of course anyone can help by testing open source software and providing feedback to the development community, reporting defects or offering suggestions.
As far as user interface, user interaction and user experience designers go, I see that offering suggestions is about the extent of involvement they can have in open source software development.
Probably the biggest open source project I’ve been involved with would be OpenAustralia and my one real tangible contribution was over a year ago with the design and implementation of the current colour scheme, rebranding the original TheyWorkForYou scheme … and that was with me wearing my HTML/CSS front-end developer hat, not my IxD/UX hat. Apart from that there’s not much I can really do on the software side except make suggestions for the developers to hopefully take on-board and implement. Luckily there’s plenty more to OpenAustralia than writing code and I’m helping out in other ways but being a user interaction and UX designer I would dearly love to be more involved in designing and progressing the project.
I use OpenAustralia just as one example, but I’m posing this as a question generally: Do front-end designers have anything to contribute to open source projects or is it only the domain of coders? If they do have something to offer and are welcome then how can they get involved and contribute meaningfully?
I’m not saying that open source software is generally ugly, unusable and unintuitive – not at all, there are plenty of great OSS products out there which means either there are some great cross-disciplinary developers around or that I’m missing something, that there are designers who don’t code who are actually managing to get involved in the design and production process.
I don’t want to aggravate the designer-developer divide but I do want to hear from both sides here, from both the designers who feel left out or sidelined and those who are right in the thick of it … and from the developers, those who feel us designers intrude, over-complicate and slow things down and the developers who want to collaborate more with designers.
And I want to know if this is even a real issue or whether I’m not seeing something. I’d also love to hear people’s experiences from the recent GovHack event – from the designers and developers, how was the inter-disciplinary collaboration?
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Nathanael,
My first quick response to this post would be to check out the Drupal user experience project at http://www.d7ux.org/
They are doing some great stuff trying to enhance the user experience for the Drupal CMS. Yes some of it involves coding, but as you would be more than aware, the coding can’t take place without a lot of UX discussion and work prior to implementation.
There are many other OSS UX side projects associated with their various core “coding” projects out there, just a matter of looking ofr something which needs work and searching for the right place to start.
Gotta run, something about the 1st day of work in 2010 :-)
Cheers,
Michael
Lots and lots of commentary about this relationship in the GNOME project at the moment… not that it has ever really been off-the-boil given GNOME’s focus on usability, but it has been of particular interest due to the recent user experience and usability hackfest in London.
I’d recommend following Planet GNOME for more on this in a major, influential, end user facing, very widely used FLOSS project.