2024-03-05 –, Stage Wintergarten
Open source programs have often been seen as hard to use. UX Designers are professionals who try to make things easier to use – that seems to be a great match! However, practices and values of both cultures often clash, and I describe why.
This talk focusses on a central difference between UX designers and Open Source developers: The ideas of what a "good" user is and one should relate to them. Given their different cultures and histories, both have come to different conclusions: The ideal user for open source projects is a programmer themselves and thus similar to the people already working on the software – whereas for UX designers, the users are seen as unlike designers nor programmers and understanding them and transporting that understanding in the project is seen as a major and difficult task.
Based on these differences, the suggestion is not to educate one profession to act like the other. Instead, I look at existing modes of cross-professional collaboration assuming that the strenght of working together are also the very different skills and assumptions that designers and developers bring to the project.
Jan Dittrich is a user researcher, anthropologist and occasional developer. Before they started working on their PhD on learning with instructions at the University of Siegen, they worked at USEEDS° and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. on Wikipedia and Wikidata. They are also long-time member of the Open Source Design community.