Genius Interview #6 - BT

Raw Notes:

There’s a few different reasons why this hasn’t been widely been adopted

Designers aren’t aware of OSS

If they are aware, it’s ugly, it’s for geeks, I don’t want to use it and wouldn’t use it

Idea of contributing design for free to OSS is not very popular/nobody thinks about

Snobbery from the design community - why do I have to bother learning about this weird code system to be able to design ‘I just design stuff’ Lack of wanting to do research in order to design for that thing you need to understand why, how?

It’s complicated

People who might not think of themselves as designers

There is design happening in OSS

Lack of interest, lack of awareness, a number of people are not interested in difficult or complicated projects.

I stopped going to mainstream commercial UX meetups - the things they focus on are banal and boring: conversion, growth hacking etc. I have no interest in those.

Gov projects have a number of mantras and guiding principles that have become twisted from the original meaning. Designer should ideally be able to create code (not production code to put on the web to have users use) but to be able to design for real code cases. But the point is if you can’t code you won’t be hired - just because someone can’t create code doesn’t mean their not a good designer.

Content designer - copywriting, emails, websites. It’s own profession/area of work. Previous what would have happened is the content person would work with design & research to build that out. Google doc page and put a whole bunch of content to hand over to the dev to then more than likely ‘he’ would be annoyed to look at the content to copy paste into the code etc.

Guarded community - wrangle (not control) some input from the technical people to allow content people to commit content into the code repo. Often they were sacred because ack! Code!

Any project that had logic in it I pushed for have translation files .json .yaml etc. they were able to create the content into code then into the content. Oh I can actually edit that content myself. Now you will have to learn the simple structure of a code file ‘That sounds too techy!’ This is your job! This is your CMS! You have to learn, meet half-way. Good people feel empowered by the access other people feel isolated by this. Conversations with developers.

Requires work and to learn.

Assumptions on the kind of people that will attend.

Designer: Opinion and approach is ‘I’m the designer, I know what’s best’ I hope my designs work well but I expect someone to come along at a later time and rip them apart for the better. That it’s not just one guy saying that they don’t like it - It can’t just be one opinion.

5 or 6 people say X ah this is a valid critical mass.

Designers struggle to accept criticism. If they consider themselves artists go make art and keep it closed. If it’s for others it needs to work for them.

If it doesn’t achieve the goal the user needs then it can be beautiful but it’s not useful.

Maybe this is why dev’s ‘get’ it more.

I was doing some contributions for a project. Some paid some weren’. Some fantastic devs. Contributors to dev? Did usability testing: evidence of X put on a git issue with advice and opinion: based on this. In commercial that’s his job/exp. There’s a lot of push back from the community because of an opinion. Discussion happens and it doesn’t

ushahidi / opendesign

Genius Interview #6 - BT #96