[Freedombox-discuss] UX

[Dave Crossland]

Hi!

>> ...have awesome UX.
>
> Delighted to see someone else bring this up! I got no replies to my attempt
> to provoke a UX discussion back in December - this might be a good time to
> revive it?

I don't believe UX design can be done over mailing lists. No free
software exists for UX tasks, that I am aware of. So I suggest we
organize face to face meetings where UX designers and Debian
Developers can spend a few days together, face to face - "design
sprints" gave birth to the FLOSSManuals "book sprints" that are doing
a good job of clearing up the mess Tim O'Reilly made 20 years ago when
he started proprietorizing free software manuals.

I'll be at SXSW and Libre Planet :-)

And with that concrete action item out of the way, I'll rant a while.
This is Debian ;-)

Since this list is quiet and many new people seem to be here, I should
probably introduce myself; I am freeing typography, and
http://www.google.com/webfonts/designer?designer=Dave+Crossland is
more about me. I have been watching Moglen's work on this since the
GPLv3/Affero days, and I was happy to see him speak at DebConf in New
York City last July and met Jonas and others at the MiniDebConf in
Vietnam last November :-)

"The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at
no cost but have to be made easy to use."
- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html

The question I asked Eben from the audience at DebConf was something
like, "The software freedom movement has traditionally been unable to
recruit user experience designers. If the FreedomBox project is to
succeed, I believe it must successfully engage such professionals. How
can we do this?"

And Eben said something like (I paraphrase) "We are wonderful
engineers, we don't need to bother making it pretty, we just need to
build it and they will come."

I considered his kindly dismissing of the issue justified since he was
playing to an particular audience, and that audience needs to hear how
wonderful they are every once in a while to maintain the motivation
that is why we are here today.

I believe user experience research and design has become integral to
contemporary software development; that design is not mere styling;
that engineers make things work, designers make things work _well_.

For distributed social networks to win out over centralized social
networks as the enabler of the next Egypt, I suggest every service and
web app served by a Freedom Box projects must engage UX design as much
as the dotcoms do :-)

I found the recent Sculley interview candid, and this anecdote
resonates with my concern:

"When [my friend] went into the meeting at Apple, as soon as the
designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the
designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone
knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting
to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft
meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no
designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are
sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the
design. That’s a recipe for disaster. Microsoft hires some of the
smartest people in the world. They are known for their incredibly
challenging test they put people through to get hired. It’s not an
issue of people being smart and talented. It’s that design at Apple is
at the highest level of the organization, led by Steve personally.
Design at other companies is not there."
- http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295

If Eben is raising $500,000 to realise his vision, I wonder what
proportion of that will be spent on engaging designers.

It sounds like he believes if he raises the money, he can recruit
*senior* software engineers to work as technical leads for a freedom
project instead of for shareholder value; recruit those who can
command comfortable 6-figure salaries but who will accept 5-figure
salaries for a good cause. I'm thinking of http://hands.com here.

What I am wondering is how he will recruit senior UX design leads;
those who also command comfortable 6-figure salaries and who have
never worked with any free software projects.

Its not just the voluneerism, as the richest software engineers do
poorly here too.

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

debian.org itself is a current example: A buildings architect who
dabbles in software and volunteered a little wireframing to Debian.org
is a good example of the level of experience in UX design typical of
an important community-driven free software project today; not the
level of experience that commands $150,000+ per year.

The experience of using centralized web software is desirable.
Designing the experience of using distributed web software to be more
desirable is work which the human resources in the software freedom
movement today can not do, because there are too few designers.

Not architects. Not artists. Designers.

It used to be none. Lately Mark Shuttleworth bought a design staff for
Canonical, and the only non-FSF speaker at Libre Planet is Mo Duffy, a
senior interaction designer at Red Hat who taught free graphic design
applications to schoolgirls. This year is the first that Canonical or
Red Hat are sending anyone to SXSW, and I'll be there. Will anyone
else from this list? :-)

That UX designers are now working for companies that publish free
software is wonderful, but as a movement we need exponentially more UX
designers. An Ivy League law professor can always pick up the phone
and get a few sweet tips from any profession, but most projects don't
have that privilege, and that doesn't scale to doing even the UX work
needed in just one project.

One might ask, designers can volunteer, can't they? Volunteers wrote
the Wikipedia and much of Debian, afterall. But my day job is
commissioning libre fonts. I hear from designers over and over that
they will work cheaper for freedom, but they will not work for free.
They need to pay rents. Paradoxically, designers are paid less than
software engineers, so our movement can't afford them.

If distributed software is to win out over centralized software as the
future of computing, our movement must recognize and engage UX
designers as much as the best big-corporate-capitalists do.

I got to the point New York's best type designers will take my calls,
but I would never get any libre fonts out of them. Upon figuring out
how I can pay 10 type designers low wages, and we'd get a few hundred
libre fonts, but not thousands, I set about figuring out how 1,000s of
graphic designers can pay rent designing free software fonts - so
we'll get 1,000s of fonts over the next few years.

How Eben gets top UX talent into all applications running on Freedom
Boxes is an immediate puzzle that I hope will be a case study for how
we can get UX talent in 1,000s of important freedom projects.

--
Cheers
Dave