Open Source and UX Design The Open Source origin

07/08/2018

Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

Jeremie kornobis UX Designer @linagora Geek, Musician and Gamer. Doing professionnal training on UX Design @gobelins_paris Nov 24, 2016 · 5 min read

Open Source and UX Design

The Open Source origin Open source movement starting when a user understand he cannot doing what he want with a printer at MIT. This hardware hacking from early beginning theorize the main concept of Open Source: give back the power of usage to the user. But the hardware problem story explain there is a large part of open source community focused around hardware problems and creating new hardware.

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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07/08/2018

Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

Open Source hardware Arduino

But, Richard Stallman didn’t stop at the hardware problematic, and launch the GNU Project to purpose an open source solution in every elds of user daily problematic. And it’s why you have now some of the most complete applications who are open source and use by governments and major industries over private software.

GNU Project Logo: GNU’s Not Unix!

From hardware to software coding So from the early 80’s, work has done to give new interfaces to use open sources software to the user, from FreeBSD to Linux Distribution.

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

But from beginning of the story it’s a tech world. User experience theses days match speci cs needs, like controlling several computer on a same interface or live edit a le across them. Not really user friendly for most of people who starting to use computers and discover the open source wold.

i3 windows manager: Devops and System Admin top interface.

It’s why Microsoft windows never loose is dominant position over the years, even if he missing great features existing in open source world.

Form software coding to designing software Lot of new feature you can see in windows 10 user experience exist for years in open source windows manager like gnome, KDE, or more recent unity. So why open source OS never known a world wide usage before?

For me it’s features over user experience problem. We must wait few decades to see the rst great step to user experience on open source with the window manager Unity project by Ubuntu community.  Because Ubuntu not satisfy from the most common used interface called Gnome and want to create a user experience to any user of linux, they launch rst version in april 2011.

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

And what’s reaction of a large part of open source community on this rst version? Flamed it, because it’s a huge change in the way user experience was conceived in OS design. A lot feel left behind, because it’s rst iteration of a user experience who’s naturally make couple of years to be stable and consistent.

Unity with custom theme paper gtk theme, because I love it :p

This reception is understandable because lot of open source are “power user”, programming features when missing it and construct experience by themself. But they lost the fundamental concept of Open Source introduce by GNU Project: give back the power of usage on the user. Since the launch of Unity, the community as evolved and understand now the power of a good user experience. They come to see all the features and concept they’re coded used by privatizing operating software claimed as “new user experience”… But there’s still a major problem in user experience in open source community.

How contributing to open source project as UX designer to improve user experience and help Open Source propagation?

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

The most easy answer is to trying to integrate a speci c community to work on one project with the developer's. But the tool developers used are code centered. So try to approach some project, make some feedback on UI stu and you nish your journey by ear the maxim: “Contribute nothing, expect nothing”. It’s a common way to refuse some feedback, and literally say your not a coder so you can’t actively work or help me coding the software. I love to think it’s a minority of the community who think like. But how kill this spirit and o er UX Designer to work e ciently on Open Source project?

Take the case of GitHub

Only code modi cation visible on a Pull Request on github

GitHub is the most used by open source community tool. He allow to share code and issue on a lot of Open Source projects, and easing the community between developers around the world.

But GitHub never mentioned mockups, prototypes, or design suggestions on it’s contributing tutorial page.

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

So you can’t see any UI toughs or UX de nition of a project on most of GitHub project, because there no ways to simply add it. It’s a terrible lack to promote open source and close to a design community who can actively work with developers to doing better user experience.

How to conceive a way to share UI and UX stu s on GitHub project? For me, a way to achieved it it’s via a sub-project, to have the possibility to centralize the commons UI concepts ruling the project. In a git repository it’s the best way I can imagine to keep it.

Versioning it’s a long time resolved problem in code community, but design’s one still face it without having a nice way to resolve it. A lot of prototyping applications exist but I never nd one who’s o er a git integration. With it come stable branch matching the common UI concepts and the features branch matching the speci c UI questions like any other code repository. By the separation between this two community, open source lose years of users enrollment. And peoples who listen Edward Snowden and start to understand the problem of private software can be drop out of open source tool because lack of User Experience on Open Source Tools. It’s why all the initiative to encourage User Experience (like the framasoft initiative to o er open source SaaS to anyone) in Open Source is now essential and non-negotiable subject.

To give back the power of usage to the user

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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07/08/2018

Open Source and UX Design – Jeremie kornobis – Medium

https://medium.com/@JKornobis/open-source-and-ux-design-84f8c37d6e2e

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