There is far too much 'walking on eggshells" in #OpenSource, mostly because the power lies with the people that are the most easily offended. I've been clobbered for saying the "#UX of opensource isn't great". The advice is always the same:
* Go slow
* Don't rock the boat
* Make small changes
That is great advice, for a dysfunctional relationship. To be clear, I'm NOT saying be dictatorial! I'm saying we can't fix a system that doesn't want to be fixed.
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Good Design must at least start with the maintainers. Designers can't "PR our way" into a good design, pushing design into project that doesn't really want it.
I agree with the advice above! We can go slow. I'm just saying it has to be done JOINTLY. The maintainer/core team has to want UX *before* the PRs come rolling in.
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And before people start with the "but corp UX is bad too" defence, of course that's true (and also quite irrelevant).
Open source, in many cases, is trying to reach the entire world. We need to work on making the software approachable and useful to everyone.
There are TONS of UX designers that are here right now, wanting to help but are rebuffed and told "they are doing it wrong" so guess what? They leave.
If OpenSource really is understaffed, that's a curious way to treat willing hands.
One last point: I'm not saying ALL #OpenSource software has bad UX! There are lots of positive examples. I'm just saying that, as a culture, it has some maturing to do. The very old and very tired advice of "go slow and try a small PR" works great for engineering (and documentation). I'm just saying that doesn't work for UX, which requires a more coordinated, shared teamwork approach.
@scottjenson the @team@neos.cms (to which I also belong) is very interested and open to work with someone. We just didn’t have any luck yet to find an UX person interested in helping us out since the original concept was made years ago.
@christian I'm happy to have a follow up chat if you're interested.
@scottjenson that would be amazing! Maybe drop me a line at christian@flownative.com and let’s set something up.
@christian @scottjenson hi i found the chat ^^ I just heard from christian that you two made contact and i was interested in particularly one thing you had a speech on youtube: Why is UX so hard to contribute to FOSS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjup7Mrj7uU)
interestingly i/we wondered that many times why no one outside the programmer bubble likes us :P
But we also assumed that GIT seems to fertilize programmers work but leads to ux / ui being harder in that setting and thus not favoured.
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Also while our small size and spread seems to be the parts where we lack but it also is our biggest gain. The Neos community is mostly active in Europe, more specifically Germany (DACH) with some exceptions. But that allows us to have regular team meetings and developer meetings on Slack. Also we have lots of creative exchange once we meetup in real live on a Sprint. Seems we are good at that. Now we need icons ;)
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