Thanks for coming, and thanks for not leaving any seats left. I think that's pretty cool. My name is Pablo. I'm currently contributing to Diaspora recently.

I'm a Mozilla representative in my country, and I founded the local chapter on my city of HaxHackers. For those of you who don't know what HaxHackers is, it's a crossover between journalists and developers to make news with data and mixed data journalism and data visualization and that kind of stuff.

For instance, in my city we worked with the local newspaper to map the homicides in 2013, which were a huge number.

The map really was helpful to show how they were developed on the geography. I recently started contributing to Diaspora on the UX side, I hope, and it's not real yet.

I found some things on the way when trying to contribute, trying to get the UX culture into the development process. There were many problems and differences and obstacles and things that I had to overcome. I yet have to overcome this year to make it really happen.

This talk is about that. It's not a talk about wireframing and prototyping. It's about doing UX in free and open source software projects. I would like to know, if you can raise your hand, how many of you are or consider yourself purely developers?

You are purely developers. You don't have a design side, an artistic side, or nothing like that.

Back-end developers. How many of you are designers or consider yourself designers? UX people, UX something, interaction design, UI, front-end ninjas, and stuff.

I know it was going to be a mixture like that. Here we are to talk about this. What is open source UX? I don't know if open source UX is a thing yet. Let's try to make it something.

This talk is about what is open source UX and how can we open the processes of design to get the free and open source projects to mix with the UX culture.

I think we should ask for the first, what is UX? Anyway, I think the definition of what is UX is pretty elusive.

There's people that think they saw a definition of UX, but I think it's like the soft squash, it's like a meat. So I'm going to work with my own definitions of what user experience is. Let me introduce you to what I think that is.

Let's just remember it stands for user experience. I know I'm stating the obvious. It's user experience. I think it's a good exercise to start with the very basics to reset our head, to reboot our heads, and start thinking what user experience is and should be and why we need that in open source projects.

Basically, it's the experience a user has while using a product. Just remember a product can be anything. It doesn't have to be like a mobile application,

a hybrid, mobile, social, web, whatever. It can be anything, something for a sysadmin, anything is a product and everything needs to improve its user experience to work better because that's the final goal. When you add that easiness to a product, when you make a product that is easy to use,

easy to understand, that is intuitive, there is gain everywhere. Everyone gains from that. User experience is something that can be measured.

It can be improved and also can be developed and designed. As you are both developers and designers, you both know what that is, developing and design, those are processes. Those are interactive processes.

They have a lot in common, but they come from different cultures. I am both a developer and a designer, and as a developer, I know how the open source movement works or how a physical project works.

When you have to work a lot with community and you have to integrate yourself into the community, it's not the same as a commercial project. It has many differences in the way in which things get done. It has a lot of mailing lists, endless discussions that maybe commercial projects don't have

because they have a product manager which is a dictator and just dictates everything and is always wrong. Well, this is a different kind of work we have to do.

I want to talk about good user experience too. I think flippers or fins are a pretty good user experience. I like things that, I mean, user experience goes for everything. User experience is, I think of it as a child of maybe industrial design or architecture

where design, where form and function, and I like to see things that are like this. They are symbiotic, prosthetic, uninterrupted, continuous. They integrate with you, like the fins. Those are really good processes for swimming on the water, and they enhance our feet.

I think that goes for everything. I like to think of user experience or interaction design or even industrial design or design in every fashion as a way in which we communicate with technology.

This bottle is an example of that. It's good for drinking. Also, let's start with what, let's continue because we already started. Let's continue with some things that UX is not.

As this hairstyle image, depending on what work you do, there's a lot of people with different ideas of what UX should be, and I try to gather some to give some examples.

One is that UX is a process. It's something that is repeatedly written on blogs. Many authors talk about this, about UX being a process.

UX design is a process. UX development is a process. UX is actually an attribute of your product. It's something you can measure. You are not talking about a process when you say UX. You are talking about the experience of your users on your product.

That is something that can be measured. It's not something elusive that it takes a lot of time to determine. No. Every product has some user experience. Maybe no one is designing, but if you are a developer and you are moving some buttons around on your design,

then you are doing user experience or interaction design. You are already doing it without knowing what you are doing. But yeah, UX design is a process, not UX itself. UX is an attribute. I like to make that distinction because it's really noisy when people write whatever they think.

This is another misconception. UX is not beauty. Beauty, of course, plays an important role in something that we call the user experience. We want things to be beautiful.

Maybe this method is not that beautiful, but it's useful. It can be better. Beauty is also a really elusive thing. It's really hard to define beauty. Philosophers are trying to define beauty for the last, I think, 2,000 years. And they almost can't.

So you can go with, I don't know, color harmonies and golden ratios all over your design, but that won't turn it magically into a good user experience or even into something beautiful. However, I should say beauty conveys some values like trust.

People will often trust, and I'm not making assumptions here. This is data. People will often trust a product if it's beautiful more than some product that is not.

So yeah, that happens a lot, and that's why people often trust products that are, I don't know, spyware, to call it in some way. They just trust it because they are beautiful, and that's it.

They don't ask questions about something that is beautiful. So it's pretty dangerous. Beauty is dangerous always. Then UX is here. This is, I think, the most common misconception. I think pretty much I was on this side in some place in my career.

I started doing UI like a gazillion years ago, and UX involves many other things. This has been said, and I think it's pretty well known. It involves visual design, interaction design, user testing, performance.

Everything is part of the user experience, and we can go even further and say that branding and packaging are also parts of the user experience. And yeah, this was a list from a blog that this is all the things that UX claims to be.

I don't know if I agree 100% with this, but yeah, it's interface design, physical audio prototyping, usability, information architecture, graphic art.

Yeah, and I shouldn't turn back because you won't hear me. Well, this is just an example of the many things that UX is and the few things that people think it is, which are just interface design and visual design.

And yeah, this is another one. I heard this a lot, like drop a UI library into your project and bam!

You have UX and everything is wow! Yeah, that is not true. I think for obvious reasons, it might solve a problem or two. We saw this happening with bootstrap.

I think bootstrap is like a disease for the web, and Diaspora is using bootstrap, and now we are migrating to bootstrap. I don't agree with that, but I can help it at least. I don't want to use bootstrap styles, colors, etc.

We are using only the grid, which is, I think, the only useful part of bootstrap. And that's why all the sites started to look the same because people think that bootstrap is UX in some fashion.

Or that your user interface will look good enough if you use bootstrap, and that is it. And this is another one, how to explain it. There is a myth that says that design is art, and it is something that can go well with developers.

Design is something that some crazy random person does on his computer, like an artist. There are these, like, prejudices on artists, like they are two emotional people,

and well, designers are, and they are really attached to what they do. I am a designer too, and I suffer that. But design is not art. That's why this guy, Chris Messina, says open source design is an oxymoron.

I don't believe that. I think maybe Facebook privacy is an oxymoron. But, yeah, web security, maybe. But, not open source. On the internet, I'm pretty sure.

I'm pretty sure. I don't have the sources. The sources are at the end of the talk, I think I included that. You can Google that, or you can go to that, and you will find it.

So, yeah, design is not merely art. Art is one thing, and design is another. Design comes from architecture and other disciplines where form meets function, and it's subordinated to form. If you want to do a beautiful battle, I'm using this as an example for the rest of my life,

it has to serve a purpose. The cup has to cover it, and it doesn't have to spill, et cetera. So I take industrial design examples because I love it, and I think this is one I like.

This is an iron. So you have style. You have an artistic approach. You have aesthetics. This iron can be of many colors. The designer chose orange for that.

So the style varies, but not the basic shape of the thing you have to build. You need a handle to iron, and a flat, hot surface to make your clothes look like in 1920. So that details the color, the ornamental choices the designer has.

He or she can do that, but they have to respect the basic function. Otherwise, it's art. Like in this one.

This is not a good design, as you can see, and I think it has a really bad user experience, but as an art piece, it's pretty cool, and I don't know what NASA has to do with it. This was tested by only one user.

And they decided to go with the designer. So that's it. The style varies, and that's a visual design problem. Whoops. Almost. This is bad industrial design.

Let me just put it in my pocket. So where are we at? So style varies. It's a visual design problem, UX 1, and UX is actually independent of style. There are very different things.

So we are not yet talking about UX in open source projects. We are talking about UX itself, but I think it's a good start to be all on the same page on what UX is, because I'm pretty sure that everyone has a different opinion on UX,

and you all know mine, which is the one that is right, I think. So let's review what the current status is. That's pretty harsh. I don't want to hurt any feelings, but I have no idea what I'm doing. It's a good moment for this.

It happens to me a lot of times. I've heard this a lot, like free software UX sucks. And suddenly it's true, and I won't like to say it most, maybe in many cases.

And also that commercial software does better. And yeah, commercial software is another kind of producing thing. It's like making cars. It's just another culture that we don't share a bit of it. And they even try to steal things from the open source culture,

or maybe they have learned things from the open source culture, but it's a different way of production. Even it's like a different way of manufacturing things. So it doesn't have anything to do, and especially the resources that commercial software has,

don't have anything to do with free software. And big corporations spend lots of money to convince you that their UX is excellent also, because in the last, I don't know, two, three, maybe five years,

UX is like a hype term, and it's something that says, oh, this has great user experience. You have to use it. And that's not even true, and I see many commercial projects that really suck. I'm going for one example. I think this image speaks for itself.

Big news. Instagram finally lets you edit photo captions, which is a stupid feature to do, and it's worth 35 billion. So yeah, it had a really shitty UX, and they convinced you this at best,

and this is not what we aim. And yeah, we... So let's talk about why free software UX? Why people say free software UX sucks?

I just realized it sounds like false sucks, which I shouldn't realize that before. Oh, sorry. Well, let me start again. I'm going to enumerate some common problems that you might have read or suffered in the past.

One is this lack of participation. There are not many designers involved in open source culture. I'm happy that there are some designers here. That's really good. I hope after this talk you go jump into projects

to do even more than you may be doing now. I don't think this is... There is like a war between designers and developers, and maybe developers don't welcome designers that much. They come from very different worlds,

and designers are pretty used to work alone, maybe pretty much because of the style thing. Every designer has its own unique style, and you can have that, but you can go around that and maybe have some workarounds to work with open source projects.

We'll see that later. But basically, this. There are very few designers working on open source projects. This is one of the reasons why. Often there are no clear paths for contribution.

Designers, when they even... It happened to me on Diaspora when I jumped into Diaspora. It began because I had some friends which I recommended Diaspora to, and they said it was ugly.

And I didn't know what to say. I said, well, it's a social network. You have posts and images, comments. Feature-wise, it's pretty much the same. It has some cool features that maybe Facebook doesn't have. But yeah, that was the main drawback for them.

Nobody said, like, I don't like the way friends are connected or how the stream is shown. I don't like it. I started doing whatever, like redesigning the whole UI and sending an image of that. But that worked, and I'm going to explain that later.

But yeah, as developers don't know how to integrate design into that flow, sometimes there are no clear paths. You just find some issue tracker with some UI bugs to solve.

Most of the times, they are just minor UI bugs, like this button looks weird. These things are not aligned and stuff. And that's not really designer work. Maybe that's the work for front-end people.

Design involves many other things. Developers also don't know where to start. There are many different places to start contributing with UI code, if you are a UI coder. For instance, I tried to do some contributions to the Aspera

when I started, and I realized they were migrating the whole framework to Bootstrap. And yeah, you can go change a part of the UI if it's going on a refactor, and there are no clear paths there too.

So there are no roadmaps for designers and also for developers. And then you also have those long-rangers that are trying to redesign the whole thing by themselves and sending a pull request with a million changes

and trying to change the whole way the application works. That's not the way it works. There are style differences. If you have one, two, three designers trying to contribute on your project, they will all have different visions of what it should look like in coder.

Yeah, I had to hurry. And yeah, style differences. You know what I'm saying. The infamous kind has requests, people requesting features. Crazy, like crazy. This happens a lot.

Then everyone is a designer. This is like the too many cooks problem. And it happens on the Aspera. It happens everywhere. Customize all the things. This is really close to the nature of open source projects. You want your project to be customized for all the users.

That doesn't work for the entity and for many things. There are no proper tools. Most tools are closed or paid. There are a few guys that are T-shaped, like half-developers and half-designers like myself. And we really help. When you have a person like this, it really helps to integrate what works into one.

Then it's code health. Sometimes code is a mess. I have tried finding good front-end coders lately. I don't know why, but I often find good back-end code and messy front-end code.

I don't know why. Also, there is maybe no room for you. You are trying to contribute and no one listens. That leads to no visibility. And that is pretty helpful.

If you are contributing with something, putting energy on it and putting your effort and your knowledge, and you don't get visibility, you get frustrated, then you should abandon it. This style goes away.

There is no style in it. Well, assumptions. Everyone makes assumptions about what the users want. They think they know because they are developing the software. The resistance to change. That happens in life all the time, so it happens in development too.

Maybe you can share your experience afterwards because I have to hurry. I wanted to share some things I found out while contributing to Diaspora.

I'd like to say overall that, as I said before, this is not a talk about wireframing or prototyping. The skills you need to have to be an open source UX designer are mostly social. You need to integrate with that community.

So you have to become a member, that's the first thing. Introduce yourself, identify some problems, do some work to show your potential. I did that. Be bold, but be humble too. Get to know the community, that's the biggest perk from FOSS projects.

Always ask the community, get validation, be honest, invite others. Relax your ego, don't try to be a hero. Give recognition if someone helps you. Don't take over. It's really common sense in social skills. If you don't have it, you will have a bad time.

This is one that I found considering starting with identity, because those projects many times have a lack of identity, so there's not even a choice of fonts and colors and things that will lead to the user experience later.

With that, identify current UX programs, ask people, do some user testing. Try to get UX into integration loop, into continuous integration. There is a place for UX. Most people don't know where to put it, but there is a place,

and you can make your own way to prototype, make testing, try to get validation from the community, and A-B testing is a good way to do that, because if you can vote the signs, then the community will have that sense that they are choosing. It's not fake, they are really choosing.

You are trying to give some options, but you can please everyone. That's the road to failure, trying to please everyone. Go with baby steps, don't go for a full redesign,

propose some minor fixes, and respect the code base that is working. For instance, in Diaspora, I try to suggest doing only CSS changes that will enhance the UI and will provide a better user experience.

Find a team, there are people working on the UI already. As in Diaspora, there are a bunch of people working on UI, as he is, but they don't call themselves the UI team or the UI people or the UI smart, anything.

Maybe it's a good time to assemble that. Set goals, set deadlines, show the larger picture. All these things involve social skills and also have some kind of leadership in the UX, because in most projects, there is no one doing that.

If there is no one, there is a good opportunity to have some leadership, not to increase your value or your ego, but to lead people into that and teach them. Try to avoid the taste police, which is the people that say all this stuff.

If it feels weird, I hate pink, I don't like the font. You'll find haters everywhere. You have to integrate with the flow. Don't try to impose your own tools into the mix. Use the tools that are on the project,

as version control, issue draggers. And yeah, use open formats, which is something that I try to advocate. As a free software advocate, I try to do that everywhere. Well, this was the question. Let's just skip it.

I'm going to show you a little of what my experience was with Diaspora last year. So I got validation, which was an advice I got from Sean Tilly. He told me, write a patch, write something small,

send a small pull request, and you'll get validation from the community, and then you will be able to suggest more changes. So I contributed a patch, then contributed a greater patch, and then I started with really shaky stuff,

like changing the whole Diaspora foundation site in one step, without asking anyone, which is the exact opposite of what I said in this talk. But that was a good... I showed you very quickly what the current site is.

I can zoom back. This is the current foundation site, and I sent a proposal which was really shocking for everyone. This was my first proposal,

which was a pretty big change, but I used the same code base, so this is made on Ruby. I didn't know Ruby, so I had to learn Ruby, and this is using the same code base and some different views, and it uses the language and everything,

and I provided reasons for everything, for the font choice, for the colors, for the background, why the logo is that big, because everyone would say, hey, make the logo bigger, and yeah, I knew that.

Yeah, but you don't have... I'm a developer and a designer. If you're a designer, you don't have to learn Ruby, but at least you can tell that

if you pretty much respect the same layout, it won't be necessary to do that much changes, and you can always ask a go there from the project if that would be too much, like proposing something and saying, hey, will this be too much?

Yeah, always, always, always. My proposal was, I wrote a proposal really detailed with I choose this font and this color because people told me, yeah, I don't like the white bar, I like it black, and like I was the employee,

and I provided a bunch of reasons, even a frequently asked questions, like, yeah, I did that. Why do you want to do that for recognition? No, I think this is better for the project. And then I did that too.

Of course, I got some criticism, which was great feedback, actually, and got some validation from the community because I showed potential, like this could be much better with some little effort. I still don't know why we are not using this site

because this is working. This is a working site. It's not an image. And yeah, then I go back there. I realized there was identity problems, even the font on the logo could be a vertical or robo-to.

Anyone, whatever works. And I started an identity project on GitHub. I made it all freely available and on Inkscape, and that's the thing I try to advocate too, making those things, the assets available.

I started doing this project. Let me show you really quick. I started doing an identity manual for Diaspora,

which is something really basic for a designer, but Diaspora doesn't have one yet, so this is like a first start towards a user experience. And then these are the next steps for this year.

I'm trying to get the UI team engaged, trying to work for consistency because there is a lack of versatility. I'm working on the Diaspora UI too with an experimental pod. I started with some stylish overrides.

This was, let me show you the current UI, the one that people told me was ugly, which is this one. This is the current Diaspora UI. I started doing experiments on my browser with stylish,

just overriding CSS without touching anything. This was the outcome, using the same markup with just CSS changes. And I have an experimental pod running that looks like this, and it's starting to look, I think, a little more solid.

And yeah, I'm trying to get validation from the community in every step of the process and trying to open the process as much as possible, and it's all an experiment. So that's it, I think. And I'm trying to build this, which is Everything Still Hearts,

which is like a digital agency to teach people to integrate UX, to connect designers to build free software tools to build free software tools for design, for prototyping. I like to use InVision,

which is a commercial product for UX, where you can build prototypes with images and clickable hotspots really easy. I want to build that on a free version. If anyone wants to help, just look for me on the Diaspora stand.

I'm trying to build a user test recorder to record Think-aloud tests, which is basically a screencast in a webcam. I designed voting app because I think that will be really helpful for community projects.

One question about the design voting app. Are you serious about that? No, I'm not serious about anything. Honestly, because for Diaspora, you have this Lumio app, right? Yeah, but it's for voting for the Congress.

It's yes, no, abstain. I want to show three, like A-B testing. Okay, different options. But maybe A-B-C-D testing. We should catch up. It works well? It works?

It works? Yeah. I tried a few and they didn't. Also building a community inside that. Right now, I'm building a website that will be on Tumblr, but it's empty now, so come back in two weeks

and it will be full. And yeah, trying to teach about open format, about open tools like GIMP, Inkscape, and share knowledge, write articles, build a place to developers and designers to work together and trying to write articles

and teach things like this talk. Yeah, and I'm looking for funding to do that, but I don't know anything about funding, so I don't know when that could happen. And yeah, I make a goal for designers.

Good designers earn a lot of money and they are not used to share their time like coders do, like for over 30 years ago. Coders really know that culture. Designers don't. And if you love design, I think it's great

to do design for open source projects. This is a quote from Elia. On the Aspire itself, there is no money to be made. And yeah, a goal for Coders to help designers to get on board, because as the guy that was sitting here, that is now invisible,

he said, wow! The most elusive designer on the world. You are a designer and you don't know how to code. Nothing. Not a single line of code. So this is why I put this.

It's a goal for Coders to help designers to get on board, because this guy here, he's really willing to help. He's here and he's standing there and he's willing to help on UX projects, I'm sure. And yeah, a quote from Jacob Appelbaum that you may know from the tour project.

I build free software for film, not proprietary in my world for cops. I think that is pretty much it. And yeah, that's that. I'm going to show you. Thank you.

You can find me on the diaspora stand too. So we can leave the room if we need to. Anyone would like to ask a question? Yeah. For me, as a tech person, how do we find

designers who are willing to help? You're on the wrong here. Yeah. I think this room is a good place to start. Diaspora is maybe another one.

I'm trying to build this to do that. I'm trying to build a community to do exactly that. I don't know any places to do that, so that's why I'm trying to. There's several initiatives trying to bring together

developers and designers. Also earlier in the day, we had some examples of that and there's an idea about an open source job board or an open source design job board, for example, which brings together open source projects and designers. So that's one thing. It doesn't exist yet, but there's several people thinking about working on it.

Well, considering we've all been using the OS design hashtag, can we keep in contact using that? Yes. Good one. Is the IRC channel open source design? Oh, yeah. So the IRC channel has open source design. If you want to look for a designer, just join that and you will get referred to someone.

OS design goes back to the operating system. It looks like that. Wait a minute. Sorry. Oh, no, it wasn't used that much on Twitter, actually. This conversation of how do we get together designers and developers in open source is

going to be part of the closing that we are going to start in two minutes. So if you want to stay and contribute to the discussion about that, please do so. Also, if you have a project and you'd like to pitch it to the designers in the room, there will be some time to do that as well. We'll start in a couple of minutes. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.