 Hi everybody, welcome to today's panel, UX Myth Haps and How to Prevent Them. Today we're joined by open sources top UX engineers and product leaders to dig into these UX Myth Haps and ultimately help us learn how to prevent them in the future. Why were they so bad? What were their implications? How did they take the future? And how could they prevent it in the future? To our attendees and participants, think about these questions I just posed and ask your own questions about UX Myth Haps in the chat. I'm Rachel Beatry, an interaction designer at Red Hat. I design for OpenShift and I'm a contributor to pattern plan open source design system. Our chat facilitator today will be SJ Clark who works as a senior user experience researcher at Red Hat who will be watching over the chat and helping facilitate our questions. I'm joined here today by Katherine Robson, Hubert, Alex Porcelli to share their experiences as leaders in the field. Kat, will you kick off our intro? My name is Katherine Robson. I'm a manager of user experience design at Red Hat. I've been in the UX industry for over 15 years doing design research in management of UX teams and I currently manage a team of about 30 people in Red Hat who are working on the developer experiences that we provide from Red Hat. I guess I'll go next. My name is Roxanne Hoover. I'm a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. I oversee a few different projects including Red Hat satellite insights and CCX. I've worked in a number of different industries. I've worked on enterprise as well as consumer facing applications throughout my career and I'm super vocal and opinionated which is one of the reasons why I think that I am here. Okay, thanks, Alex. Yeah, hi, I'm Alex Porcelli. I'm a senior principal software engineer at Red Hat working as a principal architect for business automation tools. I've been involved in talks related to user experience for the last nine years. I'm engaged and working together with UXD team, Katherine group. I'm proud of what we accomplished together but I think I've been invited here because all the countless horror stories that I accumulate over the years. That's great. Thanks, Alex and Dana. Sure. Hi, my name is Dana Gutschreid. I work as a manager with user experience and design team here at Red Hat and I still get to write code when they let me periodically so that's been my first love was front-end development. I've been doing that for about the last 20 years or so and for now my focus has been on pattern fly which is our open source design system but we also have coded components in it and I also help support our front-end developers on various Red Hat products. Great. Dana, we already have our first question. What has been the UX mishap you've seen out there that caused a large scale shift in how we think about user experiences? Yeah, so I actually talked about this one in my talk earlier. Facebook is one that really comes to mind as kind of a spectacular mishap out there as far as user experience. The Facebook privacy capabilities have been called into the public eye and that's been really a challenge I think for Facebook to figure out how to handle so much attention on some experiences around user privacy and data control and how to offer those. Yeah, Facebook's an interesting one because there's like how you view it professionally and then how you view it personally so sometimes those two things mix. I always stay away personally from creating a Facebook account because it made me really nervous putting that much information out there as a developer knowing how much damage I could do when I write bad code and being nervous saying okay everyone's just human but staying away watching this reinforced my personal decision saying okay I dodged a bullet by staying away but as a developer it made me think even more about just how much responsibility we have when dealing with people's information and how easy it is to get into a situation where we make mistakes or things just get out of hand we're trying to try to put these features in place. I'm going to get a little more philosophical and say it's not just Facebook but social media in general and kind of how I see it is you know this you know users placed a trust in these applications to protect their data and that's clearly not what happened. I don't know where that first assumption came from that original like yes they're going to do everything right for me so to me it becomes from a user experience perspective this sort of you know balancing act between like what you know user expectations were and what reality actually was and I don't I don't know where the source of all that that source of truth like from that angle came from but that's how I kind of see that whole situation. Yeah I kind of had a full arc of experiences with my space user and kind of followed other friends onto Facebook and I always have probably a healthy skeptical eye towards social technologies and I think it was a little I worked for a while on this security team of an e-commerce company and learned a lot about you know things that the end user doesn't see for privacy and seeing that you know shortly after play out for Facebook it you know really reinforce why I had come in a little bit more skeptical and then I shortly after just bowed out of Facebook because I feel very similar to rocks that the least they can do is for us with all of the information we give them is be respectful of our our privacy I mean that's really the least we can do they can do for their users so yeah that's definitely a big UX mishap in my book. Yeah and I think it's it's great to like you know have an industry example that's so clear out there that everybody can maybe relate to but you know since we're all red headers here maybe it's good to turn the eye on ourselves and look at our own mishaps too. Alex I remember you know when I first came to Red Hat the JVPM team was working on some social features. Was that a little bit? Ah yes so that's one one one of those mishaps that happen so year 2012 we have a new member coming to the team we need to find a work that was out of critical path so so this new member would explore the technology but deliver something that is not exactly part of our commitment. 2012 what we can do the best idea that I have let's add a social platform integrator like a social aspect to the platform the context is we are an enterprise software for business application I don't think they are much willing to get social interaction they just want to have their work done and the context of that is like it's kind of a bunch of developers working creating business process business rules the context for process would be more focused on other thing but we created the social feature it was exciting by a lot of things that we could imagine and and because this is a new engineer coming he he wanted to show the some good work right and of course we over engineered the whole feature it was super complex so it was not just to display things but how we treated the followers the unfollowing and the how just to build the events and how to do things so that was an impressive situation that we created for mishaps because definitely that was not the proper place to add social features it reminds me so much of like you know this desire to want to be innovative and to like adopt new technology without always considering if it's really appropriate for that moment I can tell you even over the last even the last week you know I've been working with my team on some designs and we're trying so so hard to put in this this it's not new but it's like it's new for the industry right it's new for web or enterprise applications and you know every time we run these beautiful designs by all you know by all intents and purposes by the customer they're like yeah I just want a table every time so you deflate a little bit right because you're like oh okay but I think what the example you gave Alex reminds me so much of that like we're trying we want to be innovative we want to be creative and sometimes it's to our own detriment yeah and and there's also consequence of the feature right because it goes beyond just the some screens in the UI it goes towards the infrastructure that I had to put in place we have just one thread just to listen to events in another thread that recreate the new another events and we have a third thread that had to serialize that so we don't want to lose the events right it's a it's a social place we don't want to miss anything that other engineers were that I'm following they're doing open a file close a file everything was generating actions in the system so we create a lot of backend infrastructure that was not helping that's it that by this way the social aspect that was pretty common across a lot of enterprise right I remember where I worked even before red hat that was such a big thing they're looking at a lot of social media starting up saying how can we embed this in our application and it was around a similar time that other thing that something similar was happening not with social assets but looking at other technology and saying can we adopt it really quickly so one thing that happened to us was and it cost years of time was was the advent of flash in enterprise software so there was this thing that came along called flex back in the late 2000s 2006 2007 macro media and then adobe introduced it and a lot of enterprise software like this is going to be great for making dashboards because it will look the same everywhere we put it and you didn't have to worry about browsers and all these other problems said we'll just use flash as a way of delivering that and we jumped on that bandwagon spent a long time building out some flex dashboards because they could be compiled and they felt very enterprise-ish but then and I started looking at the history like so what what happened what blew up with that and then it was shocking because it was Steve Jobs wrote this open letter about thoughts on flash and it just completely blew the whole thing up like the CEO of adobe responds and everyone starts taking sides in the android and apple and everyone's like we don't want to run this on our mobile device platform but it effectively killed it and I think in 20s right this this year sometime a lot of browsers are going to finally stop it it's just going to be completely disabled with absolutely no hope of getting it running so it had sort of a slow death but in terms of an experience problem where all of this stuff that we built just had to disappear it was a pretty big one for us I have a good experience around also flash we I had to be involved with it on a proprietary system that was all based on flash that we had to convert to standards hml CSS JavaScript that back in the days but and one thing that I want to in the context of red hat that we're talking here is like I mentioned the mishap that happened on jbpm that was that was a mishap but that's the advantage of open source perspective because this all was done on the community and in baking time in community before becoming part of the product and roll out to these two main enterprise customers out there so we had the baking time to get a feedback and say and work close with catheter and work with the teams that reassess re-evaluate is this the best option is it that that was I think a very appealing for us at least my perspective that open source helps a lot how our motto is and I think that that bridges really well into this question that just came out and thinking about open source in these terms of do you think these organizations and projects were able to come back from these ux mishaps yeah that's a great question you know I think alex just gave a great example of how you can kind of save yourself before you cross the line of no return I think in you know in facebook's situation they they certainly might have crossed that line of no return with a good part of their market there's of course people that will stick with facebook forever those that won't but they really tarnished their brand um with that quite a bit and I think it's pretty hard when you actually you know impact the your brand reputation and what people perceive as what your value is and what you're willing to do for them that can be really really difficult to recover from and just to add on what cat was saying um you know that aside from social media in general in my mind being tarnished right now everyone's you're always a skeptic what are you signing up for what are you giving away but they had you know the eye of the government turned on them right it's not just with the users I mean the the federal government is looking at them looking at the industry in general and saying what's going on here so um recovery I mean they're so big probably but like what does that what does that mean I mean sound looks like a big headache to me but yeah yeah such an interesting problem because I think Facebook damaged their own reputation but did they damage the idea of social media as a whole like kids still love sharing things about themselves and it's just basically it's just the next thing so now it's well you could say one now and it would be gone in a week or two if somebody watches a recording here so it moves so fast so I think it's just made a lot of people very skeptical like you're saying about privacy and then just people make a decision like do I put everything out there just know that it's going to be open and I have no choice and it'll just be there forever and I think a lot of people are becoming especially younger people either very comfortable with that or very resistant it's just kind of divide created this bigger divide in in how people feel about security yeah and talking about the case that I was more involved with right I think we managed to come back somehow if we can show some slides I think we progress a lot to just have this process to baking community get interactions get the working clothes definitely with UXD team that was like in the beginning was just a bunch of engineers playing around the platform that were just web tools and now it's becoming more structure things are having process so we evolved quite a lot from there at least I like to think about that way and that's one of the one of the amazing aspects of open source right is it can pair it can pair different roles together so in a world where engineers maybe only would have ever interacted with engineers you now do have the ability to interact with people of different roles there could be a content person there there could be a UXD person there all for the love of that project or for the you know dedication of that project you have that resource available that you you might not have had before yeah I'm thinking about that flash example as well and I'm thinking back to when I would go to these pages on these brands that I really cared about and it would just be like a flash splash page that would stop me from like purchasing or buying or anything like that and I'm thinking were these brands able to recover from that like slow stop you know full experience and then maybe you don't make it to the pathway that you had originally intended to go down so what do you think Dana do you think they were able to recover yeah well I mean a lot of code changes in terms so quickly that you just wait a little while and then as long as you're still building things and you haven't lost all your customers it's usually okay for this project we pretty much deleted any code that was built for flash and just started fresh so it was probably two to three years worth of a developer or two's time that was lost I think the bigger thing I learned from that is that being aware of what direction the industry is shifting in and not fighting it is a really key skill to learn as a developer especially in the user experience space because you're right on the cutting edge and things will shift so fast with people's phones and devices introducing technology that if you can't respond to it you're like no I love this technology I'm going to stick with it until I until my dying day you're that's you're just going to be stuck with it and people are probably going to abandon what you've built so that's something that I tried to take away from it is that you have to be aware of where the industry is going and as soon as you start to see those things coming up in this ground swell where everyone's going in a direction you're you're better off not fighting it even if even if they're wrong and you say hey that's not the right technology and you know it in your heart it's it's not going to matter because things will shift so fast yeah I think one of the things that I've learned in this industry you know watching all of these technology changes like Tuna has been saying is that you just like especially from a designer perspective you have to not get caught up in all of those technology changes your engineering teams are like super excited about it you have to like create a little bit of a wall there and you're like that's great but I need to focus on the user and design what they need and you can play around with whatever technology helps you achieve that but let's just focus on the right design um and and so often in this industry you know we all get caught up in those kind of ground wave of movements around you know social media around new technologies around everything else and it's you have to take that step back and keep a level head sometimes but um I know for from a design perspective I mean what's the saying throwing the baby out with the bathwater you have to get used to it I joke with I joke with customers and people that I meet with like don't worry but you can tear the design apart it's fine I'm not emotionally invested I've I've I've matured in my career where it's like okay okay feedback is good what do we got to change here you know not to get not to think that the way that I did it was absolutely the right way and in mind there was a designer his tagline is strong opinions loosely held yeah that's right and I I feel like that um that like sentiment of of like loosely holding our our strong opinions like really functions well and open source community where we're hearing a lot of different and we have a lot of valid thoughts being put into the pool of things to be considered like design engineering beyond like you know it all comes to the table and that's what we love about open source and that's why we're here and I think that this next question really speaks to that which is in what ways can or prevent yeah I think we touched on that a little bit I mean the fact that we get this technology out in front of users in sort of like a very beta way before releasing it in in our enterprise kind of GA ready mode is really advantageous and beyond that because we're actually building it in that upstream we're building it in a transparent and open way where others can participate it means that you get a very large diversity of opinions you can really gut check some of those decisions along the way so that maybe you know if you're about to make a mishap you have a whole community of people jump in and have an opinion about that situation and sometimes that can be super rough like you when you're not ready for that level of feedback and opinion that that can feel really tough but at the end of the day it's part of what makes open source so great is because we can have that diversity of opinion have those conversations in the upstream in the community and then come out the door with a much better and stronger and more like ethically sound and everything else projects yeah and adding to that that you said cat there is the passion people involved in community they are passionate usually they care a lot and the feedback is candidly that way that that comes with passion sometimes a little bit too much passion that that that what happens but it is it opens so much in the world that we're being talking percent not it has been really in the media today that's the diversity that we're talking here in open source in a community that's across the globe you have people around the world having their inputs and that's a very unique position that you have eyes of the world consuming and contributing and passionate about the technology that you are building and that I don't think it prevents the mishaps but it gives you during this baking time that you just mentioned that you you put something very alpha beta stage you can adjust quickly you have a way to to understand the feedback that's not in the traditional closed source environments or proprietary technology that it's running and I bet all of us have an experience of a software or anything that oh I just wanted to submit a pull request there that fixed this annoying issue that I face every day using whatever software we do I just need to echo again what what al is saying I mean I know that the upstreams that I'm involved in a lot of them are global and I cannot tell you the value that comes out of a global set of eyes it's it's no long even from a cultural standpoint there's super there's there's a tremendous amount of value in the perspective they see on the work that I do when I've submitted even visual design work up to the upstream community that's been that's been frankly I I mean it would make my job so much harder not to have them there yeah I like having a community for the code to work on I think another aspect for for some of these mishaps is if is if the code had been open it would have been so much harder to hide from people what was happening with their personal information because people would have just dug in said okay this is the stream of where my data's going you know what's being done with it they would have been able to see what how it's being stored and and and all those pieces so it makes it a lot harder for for companies or anyone who's maybe not behaving in an upstanding way to hide what they're doing or when they are and they say hey really you can trust us they can just say hey go look at the code if you have a question and it's right there and that that makes a huge difference yeah now I've gotten used to that level of accountability and when I'm like contributing to an open source design system I really depend on that feedback and you know maybe in other environments I would have to you know pull that out of others and I just I just love that folks bring it to the table and from different backgrounds as well and and early on you know it's it's better to learn about something earlier than than later after the fact so yeah I I just think that's really well said and um I all that a really fun question came in that I think it's a good thing for us to wrap up on a day which is what's one UX myth hat that you've had with this new work remote environment and how did you get through it I think we've all had one of these come up maybe a few maybe 10 maybe more uh through this time so I would love to hear about your experiences and uh share that with the group virtual school so good if virtual school was open source I wouldn't have probably 75 percent of the problems I have going on with the login and logout of chromebooks of you know single sign-ons from other systems overriding chromebooks chromebooks overriding single sign-ons oh my goodness that we need another session for this yeah it happened you just mentioned it just happens now I'm facing a problem that I the school it cannot solve yet during the summer my son got access to his account the school account and he changed the password fine enough this the chromebooks are were delivered so he logged it in in the because it used the google account right but they school set up a lot of other applications with that default password but connected to the google account what happens now is he cannot access any application so just the google classroom but other application videos he's blocking everything and because the password is just short the original password is just short they managed to they probably have a communication with google directly an api level and they cannot send it back to be able to work so at this point nobody can change his password to original one and the other applications to have the the original that is incompatible it was almost the opposite I had to buy a chromebook for my daughter so it ties to a gmail account so when she would go to log into google classroom because it's a chromebook it's trying to use her personal gmail it's overriding the school's authentication needed to actually access google classroom I mean I have to say we're pretty lucky because we actually understand how these workflows work otherwise I mean it could have it would have taken a parent weeks to figure this out I figured it out in a few hours but still I mean oh my goodness it was very frustrating the whole environment's fascinating it's just so amazing to watch what's happening and and I have to give these teachers so much credit for trying to figure these things out on spur of the moment it's it's amazing what they're what they're doing in this stay right now but I my daughter asked me how come every time I walk by the table I shake my head or I sigh and it's like scarlet that's my daughter it's like all of your classes either the teacher can't hear any of the students her microphone's not working the screen's not showing the slides that she shared with the students aren't working or when they click on a video nothing happens so and then she says well you all have to make copies of the slides and then you hear like Kevin from down the street like saying well this is how you do it you click the file menu and these 11 year olds are all helping each other and the teacher half like today at least two of her classes were just canceled after 15 minutes not because the students couldn't connect but because the teacher trying to use it wasn't able to get the equipment connected so that she could teach the students and I just I feel so bad for them it's a huge usability problem because it's likely that their headset and whatever equipment they have connected just something disconnected or chopped you know a different output all of a sudden became selected and then the teacher was just not able to get it back working again and it's you think about just something as simple as just I want my headphones to keep working for six hours straight which should be a relatively simple thing is almost is almost impossible to get working consistently for them yeah we actually just had a situation where we had somebody with red hat where their headphones swapped from the computer to their phone midway through the interview and so we couldn't hear them and they were presenting so they couldn't see the screen where everybody was trying to get their attention to say like hello we can't we can't talk to you anymore like you're you're presenting but there's nothing we can do over here and so you know these technology kind of mishaps that happen with presenting and classrooms and video conferences it's a real challenge when that's our like one way to communicate with each other right now man go ahead rock yeah imagine an open-source community of like kindergarten parents they would have it worked out with a 30 every parent in the world would be logged in hammering away at the system no they'd all be on irc roxy they would just say we're just gonna go just text messaging what I think about is how adept all of these students are going to be at these tools I mean here I am look like Kat was saying looking for my screen share you know waving at people like tell me if I'm not sharing and then accidentally closing closing out of the google meet so I think we still have some usability things to work out for these for these young students and you know they'll be pros at it by the time by the time okay yeah I have to get pop in a little bit of credit because at least they put the leave button like a way in a different location than the rest of the somehow that is not a standard practice yeah front and center every yeah I love how it's typed out leave very far of where you are clicking that's amazing yeah so um okay I'm gonna say thank you so much to all of our panelists um and to all of you for you know all of our participants and question askers for attending today um we um have walked away learning that we should start early and often engaging um with our open source communities um when designing anything um so we can recreate together to create solutions that meet our users needs um and it's clear that bringing open source into the design and development process enables hero moments and product where we really serve our users best um those are all of the questions you have time for today thanks again for attending um I'm so excited to send you all off into the weekend and Alex I think your new calling in life is to set up work from home stages for everybody including leds and led bands and cloud lights I would I'll be your first client thanks everybody for attending thank you awesome thanks everybody