8 ms·

Open source needs designers

78 points by benwerd 15y ago

iambot 15y ago
i agree, I’m a designer and have been offering to fork open source projects here and there for a bit, but i think its a thing that the community has to adopt. its getting there though. developers also need to come to terms with the fact that just as a project needs great coding (by a dev) many projects need great design (by a designer)
- ThomPete 15y ago
  My experience from starting WeekendHacker is that developers do know they need it. In fact I have a lot of developers asking for design help (and luckily vice versa) The format I use is a little more free form and it's curated which I hear a lot of people say help a lot. Plus projects are fresh. I have also tried to involve myself in OSP over the years. The problem at least from my experience was that while developers have a clear process on how to work together amongst themselves. While they have created their own lingo. It doesn't really include the design process (unless they like me want to learn how to use GitHub) and how that ties into development. There is clearly a disconnect between the two disciplines and I have yet to find a tool to allow for easy transcendence. You can't in my experience use the github principles for versioning of design, since iteration works completely different for most designers. I have a couple of ideas of how that could be done, maybe I should start a WH project :)
  - gte910h 15y ago
    Thom, I work with designers and git all the time (iOS dev) Git does work for the design files (however less well than with the text the programmers work with). I'd say generally speaking, it works better if you do design and cutups for a programmer who then implements a fork. He then submits the fork to the project to be merged in to the main project if the rest of the implementors agree. Gotta find a front end programmer who likes you and thinks you're doing the right thing for that to pan out well.
    - ThomPete 15y ago
      It works when I have cut out the files and do the CSS/jQuery etc. But my point is more about about design iterations within photoshop, fireworks etc. Obvious problem is file size. It's going to be interesting to see whether LionOS will allow for some sort of integration with GitHub that allow for this.
      - gte910h 15y ago
        The files are large, for sure, but not that huge. Is there some file size limit killing you or something at github in particular? Or are you just referring to transit time (aka upload/download time)?
        ThomPete 15y ago
        Not just that, although that is a problem IMO especially with PS where the files can get very big. But also just a problem of state. A lot of designers who use PS use layers and groups to show different scenarios within the same file. But as I originally stated. The reason why many designers don't joing these projects is because it doesn't take their way to work into account. Yes you can learn to use Github or other versioning tools but that's not good enough if you ask me. Especially if you want to have more designers to participate.
        gte910h 15y ago
        Yeah, the everything in one giant file thing is a big problem for collaboration in general (even among designers). I thought the reason many designers don't join the projects is because many technical people are surly when you try to tell them to put things here and here and here... etc. It's not like you can't share a dropbox folder then occasionally check into the code base, or never check in the PSDs at all.
      - iambot 15y ago
        the nice thing about fireworks is that the fileformat is a viewable PNG when opened by someone without fireworks, so process files are visible by everyone involved. i reckon we'll get to a point where early in a repo's life there'll be a concepts/design folder with process files - would also make sense to plan the architecture in the same fashion...hmmm the possiblilities so that the dev planning the models/views can collaborate with a front-end designer as to the architecture of a site, but all within github etc etc etc. i can but hope.
  - iambot 15y ago
    i agree, as a designer/front-end dev, that uses github, git versioning works on css (~ my tone doesnt translate to text) etc, so yeah there is a breakdown when asking designers to use git, but to be honest i manage fine, so i dont see why others cant do the same :)
    - ThomPete 15y ago
      Because many designers don't know how to code :) That doesn't mean they wouldn't be valuable for your project.
      - iambot 15y ago
        implying i said they wouldn't be valuable... I am a designer and git is not coding, its merely about learning a tool that helps with collaboration, git/github being one of many. :)
        ThomPete 15y ago
        I have no problem using GitHub and I agree with you it's just a tool. I am just saying that to many it IS coding.
        iambot 15y ago
        i think we're on the same page. i can imagine that "GitHub for Mac" etc, might end up helping those designers that feel git is an unfathomable entity...
trustfundbaby 15y ago
I've always wondered about this, and the conclusion I've reached is that we don't have more designers contributing to open source because a. we developers don't make it easy for them to do so. b. designers don't care about our projects. For example, look at wordpress ... you can go in and create a theme ... today, if you'd like to, as a result there are tons of free themes out there, but how would a developer go about creating a Netbeans theme? Also, most open source projects are created because a developer wanted to build something cool for themselves ... and it isn't often that designers find those sorts of things cool as well so of course they're not going to be designing cool ui for those things The first is solvable ... devs need to make a concerted effort to reach out to designers, outline a design process (send us a psd of your design, we'll go over the details in basecamp/unfuddle/whatever and you can provide direction as we go) ... I can't see much being done about the second.
- jordank 15y ago
  I actually tried to contribute interaction design to to Elgg (referenced in the post). I spent some hours on concepts and got almost no response on the forums. Hindsight is 20/20 but I've found that some open source devs aren't that excited about people who add scope but can't make huge contributions code wise.
enra 15y ago
I've been thinking of helping open source project as a designer but I don't 1) which 2) how. 1) Most of the software I use is commercial or already well designed(OSX/iOS), so I don't really have a personal itch to fix something I use. 2) I'm familiar with web technologies, git and development environments but I think the problem is politics or communication. I imagine it's lot easier to pull a repo, refactor a bunch of code and get it patched, than it is to submit a remake of the UI and get it on the product. Somebody probably likes the old one more and feels the 128 menu options where there for a reason. I already have enough politics on my day job, so arguing on with developers on open source projects doesn't sound that inviting. I might be wrong, but it just doesn't seem like that designer friendly environments and maybe lacks the process/tools to be that.
- kleiba 15y ago
  So, who's gonna do a weekend project that solves 1) by bringing designers and free software projects together? Kind of like a match.com made for content...
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    This idea has been done to death, and when has it ever really worked?
- olalonde 15y ago
  How about you start your own open source project as a designer and try to recruit developers to do the coding? Never seen this approach before but it might be worth trying.
  - jerf 15y ago
    A common myth-let is that you start an open source project and people just come streaming out of the woodwork to work on it. The reality is that you are in stiff competition with thousands of projects for relatively rare resources. The global outcome is good, the local outcome is generally developer starvation. A developer with little more than mockups and no code to speak of is not going to win this competition, even with a truly stellar mockup.
kolektiv 15y ago
I think from the designers I know and from my distant former life as a designer before I ended up as a CS guy, it only really comes down to one thing: What's in it for a designer? * It's not scratching an itch that they have. * It's not great promotion (design has worked on a portfolio system for generations, so they have them already - showing someone what you've built is new and revolutionary for development in relative terms, but for design that's just how it is). * It's probably not much fun (it's a skill to work with designers and to manage a project such that it comes out well - one that most OS projects do not possess if I had to guess). * It's probably quite thankless (by no means a universal attitude, but plenty of developers think of design as an add-on, or a nice to have - not much of a situation to be in with your work). So why would designers volunteer for this when they could do work for themselves and their portfolio that they may actually enjoy? How many projects will provide enough exposure to make this a good use of time?
- lovskogen 15y ago
  I do design for open source projects, I've started helping out on the Gnome Project doing interface design. • It's great for scratching an itch of 'I want to help other people'. • It can be good promotion. The same way a good github account can help developers, stating and showing how you have participated on a open source project that is real is good for showing you can pull through on projects and deliver. • It can be great fun to see something you designed being implemented and working. Even more fun if people praise you for your great solution to a problem. The thing with doing FOSS as a designer, you have to take alot of control - and push for developers to code your design. It's not just delivering a PSD, you have to work with the developers. • If you solve a real problem, people will thank you.
  - eropple 15y ago
    Everything in your post is the absolute best case. It can easily go the other way and your contributions can be ignored and never used, you will be reacted to with hostility by developers who think that design is an "extra" feature, and that even if you do succeed and something you do does hit a release, the overwhelming majority (nearly all) of people who use the software won't know you exist. There are two sides to open-source development (at least, when it's not with people you know personally IRL) and one is, sad to say, generally not very pretty. Institutional hostility toward non-programmers still lives in a lot of open-source projects--usually the ones who need them the most! (EDIT: Mind you, this isn't a reason to not at least try to contribute if you feel it's important to you, but the results are often not as rosy as your post suggests.)
lovamova 15y ago
Designers like to come up with one piece of design, not working on different little design changes wanted by an entire community of open source developers. Designers like to design one product and expect developers to follow suit, not the other way around. This doesn't happen in the open source world.
- lovskogen 15y ago
  It's a great challenge to better the user experience on a small problem. Alot of designers would love doing small 'papercuts'. I don't think your statment that designers just love redesigns or complete products holds true.
  - gte910h 15y ago
    I think many designers do not know how to be really collaborative. They don't know how to bend their design to development realities and do cost-insensitive things all the time. I do professional iOS development all the time, and have had the pleasure of working with some really good design teams while working, who are there the entire process, but I've also had the occasion when a design is handed down by "god" and they won't do a damn thing to adjust to what's actually possible or doable. The communication style of designers also irks the hell out of developers. There is argument by emotion, argument by reputation and argument by logical reasoning. Most devs do the latter as a default thing. Many (I'd probably not say most) designers shoot at repuational argument overly quickly, relying on inchoate notions of things they can't really verbalize well. The fact one side is saying "Trust me, look at all the stuff I've done" and the other is saying "But this is that way and that is this way" leads to a horrid clash of communication style. This is only exacerbated via email, which is how much OSS gets done, as email is exceedingly logic based.
    - lovskogen 15y ago
      You can't be a good designer without knowing your format. And working with those would seem like hell, I guess.
andos 15y ago
[W]hile NetBeans and Eclipse feel engineered, Coda feels designed. The comparison between Eclipse/NetBeans to Coda is problematic. The OP downplays the importance of who those apps were created for, when that is a fundamental part of the design process. Both Eclipse and NetBeans are just as designed as Coda, but not for web developers. Take the “Refactor” menu in Eclipse, for example: it feels like someone is saying “We know how miserable you feel that the code sucks right now and how hard it is to improve it. Here, have these amazing tools and fix it.” For a Java developer, having a refactor do in seconds what would take a whole day definitely has emotional implications in the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels. If that does not resonate with the OP, well, that’s because he doesn’t have the same sensibilities and issues a Java developer has, not a inherent fault of Eclipse. [O]ver 80% of Linux kernel contributions are made by corporations, so it’s reasonable to infer that most open source software is built to feel an internal corporate need. Consequently, interaction design is underrepresented in open source. While it’s certainly the case that open source has a lot of interaction design issues, the who-what-why-how of the kernel are not the cause. The Linux kernel is the least user-facing component of the typical OSS stack. As Linus points out in an excellent chat with Greg Kroah-Hartman¹, there is very little left the Kernel developers can do to help the typical user. The problem is in the “userland”. Part of the problem is market. To be blunt, commercial software needs to sell, and usable interfaces are an integral part of that. OSS needs to “sell,” too: it must be adopted by a community and, in some cases, it must find a corporate sponsor. One may argue that OSS projects are started to solve the problems of a single person, but the ones that become products must have seen wide adoption. Good interaction design is, just as for commercial software, another selling point. At the same time, terrible user experience is democratic. There are loads of unusable commercial and open source software available. What open source really needs is not (just) designers, but design. Good design can only happen when people with a strong hand, a vision and any kind of design sensibility are in charge. And that’s true for any kind of software product, not just OSS. ¹. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__fALdvvcM0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__fALdvvcM0
- wpietri 15y ago
  I totally disagree with you on Eclipse. I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA extensively for Java work, and the user experience on IntelliJ IDEA is way better and has been for years. A couple times I've talked to Eclipse committers in detail about UI problems and what I get is either denial that there's a problem or an answer like "Oh, yeah, I guess we should do a UI sweep sometime." I'm sure Eclipse seems fine to the people who make it, but that's true of almost any terrible UI. Most people stop at "looks good to me," rather than going for, "tested to work well with the target audience".
iamcalledrob 15y ago
Open source really doesn't want designers. They want people to make things pretty, and there's a big difference. Bringing a competent designer on board means bringing a strong opinion on board. Someone who'll probably decide to cut 90% of the features. The problem with most open source projects is everyone involved has an opinion that they'll fight for, so you end up with 1000 features, designed by a committee of developers (see the Linux desktop)
- emp_ 15y ago
  This, twice.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- protomyth 15y ago
  I can only see a designer thriving at one of the Linux distribution companies. Companies given you a structure that will let a designer thrive if it is the distributions focus.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  So true. I've offered my services to several OSS projects in the past, and they were extremely pleased when I did... and then they fought over every single trivial tiny thing I laid out in my plan, and ignored me, til all I could say was "fuck it." I figured that if I was going to go through all that pain, I was going to get paid for it.
  - gte910h 15y ago
    That sounds like development in general. Freetime workers tend to be an overly contentious lot, demanding lots of justification for non-additive changes. You are "deleting someone's baby" some of the time.
- tsuraan 15y ago
  You make it sounds like if Autocad had involved a designer in the process, they would have wound up with google sketch. Sometimes things need to have features, even features that 90% of users won't need 90% of the time. A good designer shouldn't be the person who decides to cut features, he should be the person who figures out how to keep the features, but in a manner that allows new users to start with a minimum of pain, and expert users to keep growing into the product. That's hard work, and it takes a lot of cleverness and creativity, but I think anybody willing to do that work would be welcome in any sane open source project. EDIT: on re-reading my post, it looks like I'm saying Autocad didn't have designers, which is completely the opposite of how I feel. What I was trying to get it is that (IMO) Autocad is an amazingly approachable product with tons of features, just presented in a way that isn't terribly daunting to a new user.
psweber 15y ago
It might be helpful for developers to have a better idea of the type of design they need for their project. In my experience, when most people talk about designers, they are talking about visual designers. Open source needs help with visual style, layout, graphic elements and branding, but I feel that UX/interaction design is needed much more. Designers are rarely masters of both disciplines.
monkbent 15y ago
Open source doesn't (just) need visual or interaction designers. It needs product designers. I.E. people who say no. Needless to say, given the reality of FOSS, that's not going to happen.
- sc68cal 15y ago
  You must have missed out on last weeks posts about PHP internals devs saying no to practically every enhancement. Including enhancements with patches ready.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rch 15y ago
This is a great topic, but who are the designers that developers really need? I don't see any portfolio links in the comments yet...
wpietri 15y ago
Wow, I totally disagree with the thesis of this article. Open source doesn't need designers, not in the sense of a job role. At most companies, a "designer" is a person who by definition doesn't make anything directly useful. They produce documents describing how they think other people should make things. Much of the time their designs only get executed because somebody with power over paychecks tells developers to obey. But most open source doesn't work like that. Nobody can order a volunteer to do things differently. What open source needs is for developers to understand designing for people. For user-facing apps, the point isn't to write code, it's to make something that people use and love. To aid in that, we could certainly use help from user researchers, so we get feedback on what's working and what isn't, and get enough data help us think about solutions. And maybe we can use help from consulting designers when we need help with a problem. But I don't think we need designers as such, any more than we need managers.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  I feel like this is the attitude that drives good designers away from open source projects - the attitude that they are swooping in after the fact to destroy the hard work of intelligent programmers. If you instead see designers as intelligent people who chose to specialize in understanding and translating raw "feedback on what's working and what isn't, and [...] data" and time-tested design concepts into a final product that ties the chops of programmers with the actual human-centered goals of projects, it may result in better software. Are we really trying to, for random example, create a protocol for individually and consistently addressing nodes securely within an ad-hoc mesh network of inconsistent size which needs to route requests to one or more gateways to the larger internet, OR are we trying to help average people create their own neighborhood networks where they can share services? I submit that we're doing the latter, and the hard problem in order for programmers to facilitate it is the former. As a programmer, I stumble across magnificent libraries bitrotting on various parts of the internet that sometimes do things that I wouldn't even have imagined possible, yet no one but hobbyist techs will ever use them until they are integrated onto the backend of something that designers somewhere created to scratch a person's itch, not a programmer's. The big problem: when will a designer ever be meandering around the depths of CPAN or an aside on some obsessed functional programmer's blog? To be even more extreme, I'd like to see more projects primarily headed by designers or end user types, ones with little to no technical knowledge and a healthy respect for people who do. As a programmer, I pride myself on telling people the best way that things can be done with a computer, not what people should want a computer to do and how they would like the computer to do it. Seriously, the less I have to think about ui, especially in the context of projecting myself into the mind of somebody who isn't clear on the difference between a directory and a file, the better. Background shit that automagically runs with no interaction? Love it. Something that helps grammar school kids collaboratively research their school projects in a transparently sourced way? Somebody please draw me a picture, tell me where to put the buttons, and tell me what they should do. And even though I've written an awesome algorithm to realtime index and classify the contributions of the individual students and make suggestions about who should be assigned to clarify a portion of the outline based on keywords and library proximity - tell me where to put it, or whether I've been wasting my time and that no one needs it. I don't have to have a big red button on the toolbar. I'm smart, I can certainly use the algorithm for something else. Sorry for ranting:)
sc68cal 15y ago
The author states in the opening paragraph that he has slowly been migrating off Eclipse, to Netbeans, now to Coda!!? Seriously, what was he using Eclipse and Netbeans for if Coda is a migration path. Stating the obvious: He clearly wasn't doing any heavy duty coding. Talk about using a sledgehammer instead of a fly swatter.
pseudonimble 15y ago
Unfortunately design is best when it is totalitarian. Good design comes from a core visionary entity, not a committee. This way of working seems incompatible with open source, because developers volunteering their time don't want to be told what to do.
- tomaskafka 15y ago
  +1
tobylane 15y ago
There are designers that make pretty interfaces (last I saw Xfce needed some of them, and there are designers who make images (like OpenTTD replacement of the original game files). Yes, both are needed, but most designers go towards making websites or something else over-subscribed.
tomaskafka 15y ago
I tried helping the Wordpress comunity with this Google Summer of Code entry for Android blogging app redesign: http://tomaskafka.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/wordpress-for-android-concept-for-gsoc-2011/ http://tomaskafka.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/wordpress-for-and... . I based the design on taking the most common requests and complaints from Android Market reviews, mixed with so successfull 'post anything fast' model of Posterous. The mentors chose this joke of a buzzwords and a brainless copy of Facebook (Facebook has dashboard with 9 buttons therefore my app will have 9 functions and it is a good UX) instead: https://anirudhspider.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/version-2-wordpress-android-app-ui/ https://anirudhspider.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/version-2-wor... The code of app was terrible - mashup of business and diplay logic organized as 1 screen = 1 class. I recognized that to decouple business logic from view and enable different screen flow, splitting into proper MVP layers would be needed - and offered to do the refactoring as well. I tried - never will again. Open source my ass.

78 points by benwerd 15y ago

i agree, I’m a designer and have been offering to fork open source projects here and there for a bit, but i think its a thing that the community has to adopt. its getting there though. developers also need to come to terms with the fact that just as a project needs great coding (by a dev) many projects need great design (by a designer)

ThomPete 15y ago
My experience from starting WeekendHacker is that developers do know they need it. In fact I have a lot of developers asking for design help (and luckily vice versa) The format I use is a little more free form and it's curated which I hear a lot of people say help a lot. Plus projects are fresh. I have also tried to involve myself in OSP over the years. The problem at least from my experience was that while developers have a clear process on how to work together amongst themselves. While they have created their own lingo. It doesn't really include the design process (unless they like me want to learn how to use GitHub) and how that ties into development. There is clearly a disconnect between the two disciplines and I have yet to find a tool to allow for easy transcendence. You can't in my experience use the github principles for versioning of design, since iteration works completely different for most designers. I have a couple of ideas of how that could be done, maybe I should start a WH project :)
- gte910h 15y ago
  Thom, I work with designers and git all the time (iOS dev) Git does work for the design files (however less well than with the text the programmers work with). I'd say generally speaking, it works better if you do design and cutups for a programmer who then implements a fork. He then submits the fork to the project to be merged in to the main project if the rest of the implementors agree. Gotta find a front end programmer who likes you and thinks you're doing the right thing for that to pan out well.
  - ThomPete 15y ago
    It works when I have cut out the files and do the CSS/jQuery etc. But my point is more about about design iterations within photoshop, fireworks etc. Obvious problem is file size. It's going to be interesting to see whether LionOS will allow for some sort of integration with GitHub that allow for this.
    - gte910h 15y ago
      The files are large, for sure, but not that huge. Is there some file size limit killing you or something at github in particular? Or are you just referring to transit time (aka upload/download time)?
      - ThomPete 15y ago
        Not just that, although that is a problem IMO especially with PS where the files can get very big. But also just a problem of state. A lot of designers who use PS use layers and groups to show different scenarios within the same file. But as I originally stated. The reason why many designers don't joing these projects is because it doesn't take their way to work into account. Yes you can learn to use Github or other versioning tools but that's not good enough if you ask me. Especially if you want to have more designers to participate.
        gte910h 15y ago
        Yeah, the everything in one giant file thing is a big problem for collaboration in general (even among designers). I thought the reason many designers don't join the projects is because many technical people are surly when you try to tell them to put things here and here and here... etc. It's not like you can't share a dropbox folder then occasionally check into the code base, or never check in the PSDs at all.
    - iambot 15y ago
      the nice thing about fireworks is that the fileformat is a viewable PNG when opened by someone without fireworks, so process files are visible by everyone involved. i reckon we'll get to a point where early in a repo's life there'll be a concepts/design folder with process files - would also make sense to plan the architecture in the same fashion...hmmm the possiblilities so that the dev planning the models/views can collaborate with a front-end designer as to the architecture of a site, but all within github etc etc etc. i can but hope.
- iambot 15y ago
  i agree, as a designer/front-end dev, that uses github, git versioning works on css (~ my tone doesnt translate to text) etc, so yeah there is a breakdown when asking designers to use git, but to be honest i manage fine, so i dont see why others cant do the same :)
  - ThomPete 15y ago
    Because many designers don't know how to code :) That doesn't mean they wouldn't be valuable for your project.
    - iambot 15y ago
      implying i said they wouldn't be valuable... I am a designer and git is not coding, its merely about learning a tool that helps with collaboration, git/github being one of many. :)
      - ThomPete 15y ago
        I have no problem using GitHub and I agree with you it's just a tool. I am just saying that to many it IS coding.
        iambot 15y ago
        i think we're on the same page. i can imagine that "GitHub for Mac" etc, might end up helping those designers that feel git is an unfathomable entity...

trustfundbaby 15y ago

I've always wondered about this, and the conclusion I've reached is that we don't have more designers contributing to open source because a. we developers don't make it easy for them to do so. b. designers don't care about our projects. For example, look at wordpress ... you can go in and create a theme ... today, if you'd like to, as a result there are tons of free themes out there, but how would a developer go about creating a Netbeans theme? Also, most open source projects are created because a developer wanted to build something cool for themselves ... and it isn't often that designers find those sorts of things cool as well so of course they're not going to be designing cool ui for those things The first is solvable ... devs need to make a concerted effort to reach out to designers, outline a design process (send us a psd of your design, we'll go over the details in basecamp/unfuddle/whatever and you can provide direction as we go) ... I can't see much being done about the second.

jordank 15y ago
I actually tried to contribute interaction design to to Elgg (referenced in the post). I spent some hours on concepts and got almost no response on the forums. Hindsight is 20/20 but I've found that some open source devs aren't that excited about people who add scope but can't make huge contributions code wise.

enra 15y ago

I've been thinking of helping open source project as a designer but I don't 1) which 2) how. 1) Most of the software I use is commercial or already well designed(OSX/iOS), so I don't really have a personal itch to fix something I use. 2) I'm familiar with web technologies, git and development environments but I think the problem is politics or communication. I imagine it's lot easier to pull a repo, refactor a bunch of code and get it patched, than it is to submit a remake of the UI and get it on the product. Somebody probably likes the old one more and feels the 128 menu options where there for a reason. I already have enough politics on my day job, so arguing on with developers on open source projects doesn't sound that inviting. I might be wrong, but it just doesn't seem like that designer friendly environments and maybe lacks the process/tools to be that.

kleiba 15y ago
So, who's gonna do a weekend project that solves 1) by bringing designers and free software projects together? Kind of like a match.com made for content...
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  This idea has been done to death, and when has it ever really worked?
olalonde 15y ago
How about you start your own open source project as a designer and try to recruit developers to do the coding? Never seen this approach before but it might be worth trying.
- jerf 15y ago
  A common myth-let is that you start an open source project and people just come streaming out of the woodwork to work on it. The reality is that you are in stiff competition with thousands of projects for relatively rare resources. The global outcome is good, the local outcome is generally developer starvation. A developer with little more than mockups and no code to speak of is not going to win this competition, even with a truly stellar mockup.

kolektiv 15y ago

I think from the designers I know and from my distant former life as a designer before I ended up as a CS guy, it only really comes down to one thing: What's in it for a designer? * It's not scratching an itch that they have. * It's not great promotion (design has worked on a portfolio system for generations, so they have them already - showing someone what you've built is new and revolutionary for development in relative terms, but for design that's just how it is). * It's probably not much fun (it's a skill to work with designers and to manage a project such that it comes out well - one that most OS projects do not possess if I had to guess). * It's probably quite thankless (by no means a universal attitude, but plenty of developers think of design as an add-on, or a nice to have - not much of a situation to be in with your work). So why would designers volunteer for this when they could do work for themselves and their portfolio that they may actually enjoy? How many projects will provide enough exposure to make this a good use of time?

lovskogen 15y ago
I do design for open source projects, I've started helping out on the Gnome Project doing interface design. • It's great for scratching an itch of 'I want to help other people'. • It can be good promotion. The same way a good github account can help developers, stating and showing how you have participated on a open source project that is real is good for showing you can pull through on projects and deliver. • It can be great fun to see something you designed being implemented and working. Even more fun if people praise you for your great solution to a problem. The thing with doing FOSS as a designer, you have to take alot of control - and push for developers to code your design. It's not just delivering a PSD, you have to work with the developers. • If you solve a real problem, people will thank you.
- eropple 15y ago
  Everything in your post is the absolute best case. It can easily go the other way and your contributions can be ignored and never used, you will be reacted to with hostility by developers who think that design is an "extra" feature, and that even if you do succeed and something you do does hit a release, the overwhelming majority (nearly all) of people who use the software won't know you exist. There are two sides to open-source development (at least, when it's not with people you know personally IRL) and one is, sad to say, generally not very pretty. Institutional hostility toward non-programmers still lives in a lot of open-source projects--usually the ones who need them the most! (EDIT: Mind you, this isn't a reason to not at least try to contribute if you feel it's important to you, but the results are often not as rosy as your post suggests.)

lovamova 15y ago

Designers like to come up with one piece of design, not working on different little design changes wanted by an entire community of open source developers. Designers like to design one product and expect developers to follow suit, not the other way around. This doesn't happen in the open source world.

lovskogen 15y ago
It's a great challenge to better the user experience on a small problem. Alot of designers would love doing small 'papercuts'. I don't think your statment that designers just love redesigns or complete products holds true.
- gte910h 15y ago
  I think many designers do not know how to be really collaborative. They don't know how to bend their design to development realities and do cost-insensitive things all the time. I do professional iOS development all the time, and have had the pleasure of working with some really good design teams while working, who are there the entire process, but I've also had the occasion when a design is handed down by "god" and they won't do a damn thing to adjust to what's actually possible or doable. The communication style of designers also irks the hell out of developers. There is argument by emotion, argument by reputation and argument by logical reasoning. Most devs do the latter as a default thing. Many (I'd probably not say most) designers shoot at repuational argument overly quickly, relying on inchoate notions of things they can't really verbalize well. The fact one side is saying "Trust me, look at all the stuff I've done" and the other is saying "But this is that way and that is this way" leads to a horrid clash of communication style. This is only exacerbated via email, which is how much OSS gets done, as email is exceedingly logic based.
  - lovskogen 15y ago
    You can't be a good designer without knowing your format. And working with those would seem like hell, I guess.

andos 15y ago

[W]hile NetBeans and Eclipse feel engineered, Coda feels designed. The comparison between Eclipse/NetBeans to Coda is problematic. The OP downplays the importance of who those apps were created for, when that is a fundamental part of the design process. Both Eclipse and NetBeans are just as designed as Coda, but not for web developers. Take the “Refactor” menu in Eclipse, for example: it feels like someone is saying “We know how miserable you feel that the code sucks right now and how hard it is to improve it. Here, have these amazing tools and fix it.” For a Java developer, having a refactor do in seconds what would take a whole day definitely has emotional implications in the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels. If that does not resonate with the OP, well, that’s because he doesn’t have the same sensibilities and issues a Java developer has, not a inherent fault of Eclipse. [O]ver 80% of Linux kernel contributions are made by corporations, so it’s reasonable to infer that most open source software is built to feel an internal corporate need. Consequently, interaction design is underrepresented in open source. While it’s certainly the case that open source has a lot of interaction design issues, the who-what-why-how of the kernel are not the cause. The Linux kernel is the least user-facing component of the typical OSS stack. As Linus points out in an excellent chat with Greg Kroah-Hartman¹, there is very little left the Kernel developers can do to help the typical user. The problem is in the “userland”. Part of the problem is market. To be blunt, commercial software needs to sell, and usable interfaces are an integral part of that. OSS needs to “sell,” too: it must be adopted by a community and, in some cases, it must find a corporate sponsor. One may argue that OSS projects are started to solve the problems of a single person, but the ones that become products must have seen wide adoption. Good interaction design is, just as for commercial software, another selling point. At the same time, terrible user experience is democratic. There are loads of unusable commercial and open source software available. What open source really needs is not (just) designers, but design. Good design can only happen when people with a strong hand, a vision and any kind of design sensibility are in charge. And that’s true for any kind of software product, not just OSS. ¹. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__fALdvvcM0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__fALdvvcM0

wpietri 15y ago
I totally disagree with you on Eclipse. I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA extensively for Java work, and the user experience on IntelliJ IDEA is way better and has been for years. A couple times I've talked to Eclipse committers in detail about UI problems and what I get is either denial that there's a problem or an answer like "Oh, yeah, I guess we should do a UI sweep sometime." I'm sure Eclipse seems fine to the people who make it, but that's true of almost any terrible UI. Most people stop at "looks good to me," rather than going for, "tested to work well with the target audience".

iamcalledrob 15y ago

Open source really doesn't want designers. They want people to make things pretty, and there's a big difference. Bringing a competent designer on board means bringing a strong opinion on board. Someone who'll probably decide to cut 90% of the features. The problem with most open source projects is everyone involved has an opinion that they'll fight for, so you end up with 1000 features, designed by a committee of developers (see the Linux desktop)

emp_ 15y ago
This, twice.
deleted 15y ago
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protomyth 15y ago
I can only see a designer thriving at one of the Linux distribution companies. Companies given you a structure that will let a designer thrive if it is the distributions focus.
ahoyhere 15y ago
So true. I've offered my services to several OSS projects in the past, and they were extremely pleased when I did... and then they fought over every single trivial tiny thing I laid out in my plan, and ignored me, til all I could say was "fuck it." I figured that if I was going to go through all that pain, I was going to get paid for it.
- gte910h 15y ago
  That sounds like development in general. Freetime workers tend to be an overly contentious lot, demanding lots of justification for non-additive changes. You are "deleting someone's baby" some of the time.
tsuraan 15y ago
You make it sounds like if Autocad had involved a designer in the process, they would have wound up with google sketch. Sometimes things need to have features, even features that 90% of users won't need 90% of the time. A good designer shouldn't be the person who decides to cut features, he should be the person who figures out how to keep the features, but in a manner that allows new users to start with a minimum of pain, and expert users to keep growing into the product. That's hard work, and it takes a lot of cleverness and creativity, but I think anybody willing to do that work would be welcome in any sane open source project. EDIT: on re-reading my post, it looks like I'm saying Autocad didn't have designers, which is completely the opposite of how I feel. What I was trying to get it is that (IMO) Autocad is an amazingly approachable product with tons of features, just presented in a way that isn't terribly daunting to a new user.

psweber 15y ago

It might be helpful for developers to have a better idea of the type of design they need for their project. In my experience, when most people talk about designers, they are talking about visual designers. Open source needs help with visual style, layout, graphic elements and branding, but I feel that UX/interaction design is needed much more. Designers are rarely masters of both disciplines.

monkbent 15y ago

Open source doesn't (just) need visual or interaction designers. It needs product designers. I.E. people who say no. Needless to say, given the reality of FOSS, that's not going to happen.

sc68cal 15y ago
You must have missed out on last weeks posts about PHP internals devs saying no to practically every enhancement. Including enhancements with patches ready.

deleted 15y ago

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rch 15y ago

This is a great topic, but who are the designers that developers really need? I don't see any portfolio links in the comments yet...

wpietri 15y ago

Wow, I totally disagree with the thesis of this article. Open source doesn't need designers, not in the sense of a job role. At most companies, a "designer" is a person who by definition doesn't make anything directly useful. They produce documents describing how they think other people should make things. Much of the time their designs only get executed because somebody with power over paychecks tells developers to obey. But most open source doesn't work like that. Nobody can order a volunteer to do things differently. What open source needs is for developers to understand designing for people. For user-facing apps, the point isn't to write code, it's to make something that people use and love. To aid in that, we could certainly use help from user researchers, so we get feedback on what's working and what isn't, and get enough data help us think about solutions. And maybe we can use help from consulting designers when we need help with a problem. But I don't think we need designers as such, any more than we need managers.

pessimizer 15y ago
I feel like this is the attitude that drives good designers away from open source projects - the attitude that they are swooping in after the fact to destroy the hard work of intelligent programmers. If you instead see designers as intelligent people who chose to specialize in understanding and translating raw "feedback on what's working and what isn't, and [...] data" and time-tested design concepts into a final product that ties the chops of programmers with the actual human-centered goals of projects, it may result in better software. Are we really trying to, for random example, create a protocol for individually and consistently addressing nodes securely within an ad-hoc mesh network of inconsistent size which needs to route requests to one or more gateways to the larger internet, OR are we trying to help average people create their own neighborhood networks where they can share services? I submit that we're doing the latter, and the hard problem in order for programmers to facilitate it is the former. As a programmer, I stumble across magnificent libraries bitrotting on various parts of the internet that sometimes do things that I wouldn't even have imagined possible, yet no one but hobbyist techs will ever use them until they are integrated onto the backend of something that designers somewhere created to scratch a person's itch, not a programmer's. The big problem: when will a designer ever be meandering around the depths of CPAN or an aside on some obsessed functional programmer's blog? To be even more extreme, I'd like to see more projects primarily headed by designers or end user types, ones with little to no technical knowledge and a healthy respect for people who do. As a programmer, I pride myself on telling people the best way that things can be done with a computer, not what people should want a computer to do and how they would like the computer to do it. Seriously, the less I have to think about ui, especially in the context of projecting myself into the mind of somebody who isn't clear on the difference between a directory and a file, the better. Background shit that automagically runs with no interaction? Love it. Something that helps grammar school kids collaboratively research their school projects in a transparently sourced way? Somebody please draw me a picture, tell me where to put the buttons, and tell me what they should do. And even though I've written an awesome algorithm to realtime index and classify the contributions of the individual students and make suggestions about who should be assigned to clarify a portion of the outline based on keywords and library proximity - tell me where to put it, or whether I've been wasting my time and that no one needs it. I don't have to have a big red button on the toolbar. I'm smart, I can certainly use the algorithm for something else. Sorry for ranting:)

sc68cal 15y ago

The author states in the opening paragraph that he has slowly been migrating off Eclipse, to Netbeans, now to Coda!!? Seriously, what was he using Eclipse and Netbeans for if Coda is a migration path. Stating the obvious: He clearly wasn't doing any heavy duty coding. Talk about using a sledgehammer instead of a fly swatter.

pseudonimble 15y ago

Unfortunately design is best when it is totalitarian. Good design comes from a core visionary entity, not a committee. This way of working seems incompatible with open source, because developers volunteering their time don't want to be told what to do.

tomaskafka 15y ago
+1

tobylane 15y ago

There are designers that make pretty interfaces (last I saw Xfce needed some of them, and there are designers who make images (like OpenTTD replacement of the original game files). Yes, both are needed, but most designers go towards making websites or something else over-subscribed.

tomaskafka 15y ago

I tried helping the Wordpress comunity with this Google Summer of Code entry for Android blogging app redesign: http://tomaskafka.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/wordpress-for-android-concept-for-gsoc-2011/ http://tomaskafka.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/wordpress-for-and... . I based the design on taking the most common requests and complaints from Android Market reviews, mixed with so successfull 'post anything fast' model of Posterous. The mentors chose this joke of a buzzwords and a brainless copy of Facebook (Facebook has dashboard with 9 buttons therefore my app will have 9 functions and it is a good UX) instead: https://anirudhspider.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/version-2-wordpress-android-app-ui/ https://anirudhspider.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/version-2-wor... The code of app was terrible - mashup of business and diplay logic organized as 1 screen = 1 class. I recognized that to decouple business logic from view and enable different screen flow, splitting into proper MVP layers would be needed - and offered to do the refactoring as well. I tried - never will again. Open source my ass.