Why UX and FOSS clash and what we can do about it
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.