The other day my article on transparency was published as part of the Open Organization Workbook project and under the Challenges in transparency section I talked a bit about design:
Transparency in design presents some challenges as well. In a talk at Ohio Linux Fest 2017, Máirín Duffy from Red Hat explains “the big reveal” from design culture and how the “release early and often” mantra heard so often in open source can be difficult for designers who prefer sharing curated, polished designs. Lately the Dataverse project has been posting unpolished designs on a separate kanban board that is public but not announced. Mockups from the board appear in usability tests and are refined until they are ready to be included in a development sprint.
(For background on @mairin 's talk see Keynote on Open Source and UX at Ohio Linux Fest Sep 30 .)
Here are the two boards:
- main board: https://waffle.io/IQSS/dataverse
- design board: Trello
I feel like what I wrote is very much capturing a point in time and that our process will surely evolve and change. Also, it’s written from the perspective of a developer, not a designer.
I’m very curious what people here think about what I wrote. Does it resonate with you? Do you work in environments that push transparency? Do you see any tension between transparency and design?