Cost of design versus cost of implementation

[simonv3]

Thanks for the thoughts all!

@grahamperrin

Are you at liberty to share one of the designs? Plus, ideally, a scoping document.

Of course, it’s open source after all :). And yeah, the context is OpenFarm. Here’s an example of the awesome designs made by Sophia.

I’d be happy for more developers, but it’s a bit of a niche project. We regularly get some contributions, but it’s hard to attract developers to dive in and work on a large thing right off.

@evalica

Hi Simon, I think this happens more often than you think.

I figured I wasn’t unique in this! This is why I wanted to hear people’s opinions about this

For your two options @evalica I think we’ve exhausted option A, and hopefully option B is not off the table. I’m going to see if I can get Sophia to join this forum and add her thoughts to this thread.

We integrate our design proposal tracking with our general issues, so it makes it fairly easy to get an overview of it.

@belenbarrospena

In my case, that didn’t upset me at all: I think it comes with the job. I learn from every single design piece I do, so although it was nice to see things built, the learning made it all worthwhile independently of implementation.

I appreciate hearing this! I personally use contributing to open source to learn a lot, coding and ux-wise, so I think it’s great to hear that doesn’t end for other, more design-heavy, participants.

@studiospring

So, what prevents wasted design? Research and project management.

But, what if you don’t have a project manager, or someone with that skillset (or, again, time)? Maybe this is something @RichardLitt can weigh in on with his recently launched maintainer.io.

@studiospring

Also, by considering all your stakeholders (devs, end users, designers) when prioritising tasks, you may find that the new interface adds more value than a library update

This is super valid. I think a lot of it - personally - has to do with “What can I get done in the 1 hour chunk of time I have available this evening”. Updating library might seem easier than taking on a design overhaul. Better planning, organizing and incremental design would go a long way to fixing this, which is what you’re getting at @jdittrich. I think we’ve done an okay with that, but might need to get a bit better at it.