Bonjour,
In the same spirit as User research for an open data publishing service back in 2019, we’re bootstrapping a User Research for a forge federation service, a Free Software project for which @Gawan recently provided a logo 
The process will be fully documented in the UX category of the fedeproxy forum and the final report will be published here as a conclusion. Everyone interested is of course welcome to join the fedeproxy forum and discuss the details: only it seems a little too much to spam the OpenSourceDesign forum with all the legwork 
The fedeproxy applied for a grant back in January 2021 (all of which, including the application, is published for others to benefit from the experience). The User Research part of the workplan was a little difficult to reconcile with the requirements. There is a chicken and egg problem with projects that apply for relatively modest funding (75K€ in this case): the milestones must be defined in advance for (roughly) the year to come. How can this be done when User Research comes first and defines what will be done? This is probably one of the reasons why the Project planning and value for money part of the application got 3.75/5 which is not a great rating. Luckily the rest of the application got better grades and the grant was approved 
The project is relatively modest and I intend to keep the User Research part simple, with the following plan:
- Prepare the research
- Find participants among software developers, organizations and forge maintainers
- Prepare the research sessions
- Create an intercept interview script
- Conduct interviews with the participants
- Organize an affinity mapping session to identify emerging themes
- Analyze the results and write a report with recommendations for the implementation of the fedeproxy user experience.
I have a few personas in mind and will start by writing a description down and reach out to people I know, asking if they would agree to interviews. If you know anyone interested, please let me know. There certainly is a bias to be avoided when relying only on people you already know. Any advice you may have would also be most welcome, of course!
Cheers
