So, some great conversations at #fossback26 design. And some that really frustrated me. During the "how to bridge the gap between "ultra-nerdy" devs and designers" barcamp, someone said "we have to decide who to disappoint when making design decision", and someone else said "spoiler: it's the power users".
If our attitude towards #uxdesign is "fuck the power users", we'll never have good UX in open source.
@marmarta Good UX requires validation by testing with actual users achieving their goals, not designers making things appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities (which seems to drive at least some of these anti-power user sentiments). The latter can be helpful too, but since most designers working on FLOSS lack resources needed to do the former it often ends up actually detrimental to UX...
@marmarta What I meant by "aesthetics" would also contain (or perhaps actually be defined by) this desire to streamline, so thanks for putting it into much clearer words than I could 😀
@marmarta @dos UX training is not about removing thinking. @camerontw had a great definition recently: design decides where to regularize (flatten complexity), and where to make space for complexity.
The instinct of power users is to maximize complexity, which doesn't serve good UX either. There's a great old essay (the Turing Complete User) about the tendency to enforce becoming a programmer onto users.
The power user is rarely as advanced as developers hope.
@marmarta @dos @camerontw Honestly the right answer to the question of who to disappoint is always going to be "the developers and designers of the thing." Our egos lead us to solve product problems over user problems, to end up with supporting a bunch of "use cases" no real user has.
@PavelASamsonov @dos @camerontw I do not agree. FOSS is not simply a product you make for others - it's also a thing of passion many people work on from the pure love of it, for free. If you go to those people and tell them "your needs don't matter, shut up and do it differently", they will not listen to you (because they are human). If we want better FOSS, we need to tread the devs and the nerds and the power users as an important user group and as people, too.
@marmarta @dos @camerontw "Better" always raises the question: "better for whom?" I think it is fair to say "contributors want to prioritize their own needs." But that does not make the software "better" in a universal way. Mastodon is a fantastic example.
@marmarta @PavelASamsonov @dos @camerontw And that is, indeed, the very crux of the matter when it comes to #FOSS.
The HCI prof at my alma mater had this nifty reminder for interaction design students: "You have two degrees of freedom when you design software: You can choose _what_ you build, and you can pick_for whom_ you build it. Everything else directly depends on those two decisions.” (1/4)
@dos it definitely is part of the problem, but I think that a big thing is that a lot of UX training and a lot of most important UX books are all about streamlining, removing thinking from user experience and generally making things seamless and inobtrusive. Which serves great if you want to sell things, but shouldn't always be the goal - but it isn't that easy to find good UX information that is not focused on that.