[Freedombox-discuss] UX

Fri Feb 18 13:02:14 UTC 2011

Dave - good to see you on this list. 

And good to see the conversation on the need for good UX on the Freedombox. That's often what I'm asked by my clients to coordinate.

I just found out about the Freedombox last week - I've got a couple of projects that might be nice fits on the Freedombox - so I subscribed to this list in hopes of confirming - and finding a starting point.

More about me here - http://garrckvanburen.com

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Garrick Van Buren
612 325 9110
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Kernest.com
Free, subscription, and web native fonts.
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On Feb 18, 2011, at 4:03 AM, Dave Crossland wrote:

> 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
> 
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