Belen Barros Pena

Most of the free software projects I know do little to none research with their users. Well: the vast majority do absolutely none, and very few do a teensy little bit, most of the time with the most vocal members of their user base. Why is that? Why is free software afraid of user research?

This presentation will propose a classification of free software types based on their ideas and attitudes towards user research. The classification is really just a joke, but I hope it will help me debunk some of the misunderstandings and myths that surround user research in free software circles. I will also try to explain what user research is actually about, how it can help your free software project, and give you some advice on how to get started with it.

This talk will be about establishing good ethical guidelines and standards for user research for the SecureDrop project. The 2 speakers have contributed to SecureDrop, an open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and whistleblowers.

This talk will be about how we established good ethical guidelines and standards for user research for the SecureDrop project. The 2 speakers have contributed to SecureDrop, an open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and whistleblowers.

It will focus on why ethical research is important in user-centred design, how to do ethical user research in open source projects. It will also explain how to establish a trusting relationship with participants.

Early in 2018 I responded to a call for help published in the Open Source Design jobs board (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/). It was from the maintainer of something called SReview (https://github.com/yoe/sreview), which happens to be the software FOSDEM uses to capture, post-process and publish the videos of all the talks at the conference.

Over the past 10 months we redesigned the SReview interface in a user-centred, collaborative, iterative and open way. This talk explains how we went about it. Using a model of the "ideal" design process as a reference, we'll show where we deviated from it and why. The moral of the story? There is no best way of doing design. The best way of doing design is the way that suits your project.

Early in 2018 I responded to a call for help published in the Open Source Design jobs board (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/). It was from the maintainer of something called SReview (https://github.com/yoe/sreview), which happens to be the software FOSDEM uses to capture, post-process and publish the videos of all the talks at the conference.

SReview takes a rather ingenious approach to the problem of how to review presentation videos before publication. Instead of the small video team doing all the work, which would take ages, they crowdsource the task, by asking the speakers themselves to review their own presentations. Speakers get an early preview of the video - something they appreciate -, and the FOSDEM video team gets the job done faster. Everybody wins.

There was only one small problem: the interface speakers had to use to review presentation videos was not working. Speakers kept making mistakes in the process, which caused a lot of extra work for the FOSDEM video team.

Over the past 10 months we redesigned the interface in a user-centred, collaborative, iterative and open way. This talk explains how we went about it. Using a model of the "ideal" design process as a reference, we'll show where we deviated from it and why.

The moral of the story? There is no best way of doing design. The best way of doing design is the way that suits your project.

This session has become a bit of a tradition in the Open Source Design devroom. Every year we close by inviting FOSDEM attendees to introduce their projects to the designers in the room, and tell them the type of the design contributions they need.

I thought we might want to do this again.

The day has been filled by designers doing all the talking, but here we switch and give the stage to software developers.

This is a chance to pitch your project to the designers in the room and ask them to contribute. You will be given some time to explain what your project is about, why it's important, and what design work needs to be done. No need to book in advance: just turn up!

We have done this session for the past 2 years, and everyboy seems to like it. So we are doing it again.

Slides available at https://belenbarrospena.github.io/fosdem2017

The decision of creating a jobs board as part of the Open Source Design project was no doubt an excellent one. Our conversations during the first Open Source Design devroom showed that a place to match designers with FOSS projects was sorely needed. At November 19th, the jobs board has received 53 submissions. I consider this a success, given our limited reach and the small size of the Open Source Design initiative.

Going through the content of those 53 submissions shows a clear pattern: the overwhelming majority are looking for graphic designers, and many of them are asking for a project logo.

Although graphic design is absolutely fundamental to software, and branding elements such as logos help projects develop and strengthen their identity, user-centered design is much more than that, as the content of our devrooms illustrate. It is also important to understand that good graphic design does not exist in isolation: it is embedded within the work of other user-centered design disciplines and concerns.

User research, information architecture, interaction design and content strategy can make valuable contributions to FOSS projects. The question is, how? What needs to change for FOSS projects to identify the need of an information architect or a user researcher? Is it just about building knowledge and awareness about these branches of design? Or do these disciplines require some fundamental changes to the way contributions happen?

This talk is more about questions than answers. It will provide a brief introduction to the different "layers" of the user-centered design process as outlined by Jesse James Garrett (http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf), and will pose some questions about how to incorporate them into FOSS projects.

Finding the answers to those questions is one of the reasons why we need the Open Source Design community.

In this talk, I will tell you how and why OpenEmbedded embraced user-centered design, explain our design process, and show how design can make important contributions in the most unlikely places.

OpenEmbedded is an embedded Linux build system, a wickedly complicated tool for engineers to create heavily customised Linux distributions for small computers. OpenEmbedded tools have always been text-based: their users are masters of the command line, and have trained their brains to extract knowledge from large blobs of raw text data. How did an interaction designer end up becoming an OpenEmbedded contributor?

In this talk, I will tell you how and why OpenEmbedded embraced user-centered design, explain our design process, and show how design can make important contributions in the most unlikely places.

In this session we will show how to build a simple, cheap and portable testing lab to run and capture usability studies with mobile devices.

Back in 2009 we decided that recording usability tests for mobile devices was too hard and too expensive, and that logistical issues were preventing people from running sorely needed usability studies for their mobile software. The outcome of that was crappy mobile software all around.

There had to be a better way, so we set to find it. And find it we did. We called it "Do it yourself mobile usability testing", we released it under a Creative Commons License, and has been doing the rounds in design circuits ever since. We have showed it at EuroIA, the IA Summit, South by Southwest Interactive, Mozfest, UX Spain, UX Sofia, UXLX ... we can't even remember all of them. We now want to show it at FOSDEM, and do justice to the open nature of the project from its inception.

The session will skip the theory bits (20 minutes is not enough), but it will include a brief review of the most common capture approaches for mobile usability studies. Then we build the usability lab in front of you, so that you can see how easy it is, how cheap ... and how fun!