This site is archived.
Skip to Content

Bare Naked (Open Source) Design

Your session in a few words: 
the challenges, rewards & opportunities of designing with an open source community
Track: 
User experience and design
Session Type: 
Lecture
Level of expertise: 
Beginner
Language: 
English

Finding a way for a strong design and user experience culture to develop in open source software communities could be one of the more critical challenges for open source projects to address if they are to remain sustainable or, better still, go close to meeting their incredible & exciting potential.

Since around August last year I've been working with the Mark Boulton Design & the Drupal open source community to make some pretty fundamental changes to the design and user experience firstly of the Drupal.org website and now to the user interface for the upcoming release of Drupal 7.

Running a 'top down' design project in a 'bottom up' developer community is a big hairy challenge, and as much about community as it is about design. There are some big issues but there are equally big opportunities for the design & user experience (usability) community in Drupal and I'd like to use this as a forum to start understanding the problems better and framing some potential solutions.

(This talk is based on one I presented in June 09 at Reboot 11)