 We're ready for Belen. Belen Barros talking about Beyond the Fancy Logo. Well, thank you very much for coming to this talk about design beyond fancy logos. This is mainly a talk for developers. So all the designers in the room and all the people, I hope you can bear with me. I hope the streaming will send a message across. My name is Belen and I design software for a living. Now, designing software is not just a single thing. It is a set of activities and these are they. You need to explore the user's needs, their problems and the context in which you're using your software. You have to produce the content in that software, decide on the structure and behavior, determine in the navigation and the interface components, determine how the interface looks like, its layout and graphic design. Designers are not a single thing either. They are also a set, a set of roles and these are they. User Researcher, Content Editor, Information Architect, Interaction Designer and Visual Designer. Like some people might tell you, oh, there are things missing from that list. You know, you're missing things like UX person and designer strategist and service designers and I'm going to say, yeah, sure, but I think that this list is probably a good compromise between what actually happens when you make software and the design industry bullshit. Now it is important to highlight that this is not people. These are roles and these roles can be performed or played by one person, a single person or a few people. For example, in my daily job, I play these roles. The role of user researcher, Information Architect and Interaction Designer. Now, this is how the design activities map to roles. This is what each of those people do. Now, one of the things that caught my attention when I first started working in Open Source five years ago was that a lot of the designers that were involved spawned most of their time as playing one of the roles and only one of them and that role was visual design. This was five years ago. Today the situation hasn't changed. It's still pretty much the same. So designers in Open Source are spending the bulk of their time looking into how the interface looks like, the layout and the graphic design. The question is, why aren't free and Open Source projects paying attention to the users, the content, the structure, the navigation and the behavior of our software? Why are we not looking into the known visual aspects of software design? And at this point you might tell me, that's not true. We do pay attention to all those things and I will reply, no we don't. And you will say to me, oh yes we do. And I will say, no we don't. And I like this until the end of time. I need to break the tie. I need to provide you with evidence. I need to prove to you that what I'm saying is true. And to find that evidence, I went and looked at the Open Source design jobs board. So this is a place where Open Source software the projects that need design help can submit a form like this. They fill out this form if they want or they need design help. And then that form is published in a website. And so designers who want to continue to Open Source can find these requests and they can actually help and contribute. So that's what I looked at. If free and open source software projects were paying equal attention to all design activities the hypothesis would be that we should expect similar number of jobs submitted for all the design roles. But is this what's actually happening? Let's see. So between February 2015 when we launched the jobs board and January 2017 we received 61 jobs. I took those jobs and I looked at the descriptions and the titles and I mapped them to the different design roles that I showed you before. And what I found first of all is that six of those jobs were actually for front end developers. Now front end development is not one of the roles that I listed before so I took those out. That left us with 55 design jobs. Of those 55, 38, 69% were very clearly and unequivocally asking for a visual design role. Another 14, 25%, I quite couldn't work out what they were asking for. And this was because either they were being proposed fully vague, like this job that was being really open or we can create a position to fit your skills and to fit your interests, which is really nice. Or because they were sending very confusing signals like this job that says role, usability, tags, interface design, branding and logo. Now usability is the realm of the user research role but interface design, branding and logo are mostly the realm of the visual design role. So the description didn't give me any hints. So I didn't quite work out what they were asking for in this case. Three jobs, 5%, were clearly and unequivocally asking for no visual aspects, for no visual roles of design. I also looked at the kind of language people used in the job titles and the job descriptions. And I found 13 instances of non-visual design languages, design language, things like usability, information architecture, human computer interaction, user research, user testing, this kind of thing. 13 instances, but they were only, they appear only in six jobs. And in fact, one job was responsible for more than half of them. By contrast, 33 jobs of the 55 included the word logo. And I also looked at the design titles people used. So 27 jobs of the 55 were referring to job title, we're using a job title that clearly refers to the visual design role, things like logo designer, icon designer, brand designer, graphic and visual designer. One job mentioned a non-visual design title. One job asked for an interaction designer. No job asked for a user researcher, a content professional, or an information architect. So we look at the jobs and we accept that those jobs are a fair representation of what is happening in design in the world of free and open source software. We must conclude that no, we are not paying attention to the non-visual aspects of design. We are not paying attention to the user, to the users, to the content, to the structure, to the behavior of our software. It turns out from this data that free and open source software projects are mainly looking, they're mainly worrying about the way they look like. And very particularly about their logos. So if free and open source software projects were a person, they would come across as quite vain. Now, is free and open source software really like Justin Bieber or Kanye West or whatever? Absolutely not. We hear a lot of things, but we are definitely not vain. So why? Why is this happening? Why aren't free and open source software projects not investing any effort in the non-visual aspects of design? Well, to be honest with you, I have no idea. And the more I think about this, the harder it is to come up with a satisfying answer to this question. I think, like all complex questions in this world, it's a combination of things. And as such, I think it is the responsibility of this community in the room to actually come up with an answer. However, I suspect that the answer to this question is somehow connected to the answer to another question. Why? Why should we invest on those non-visual aspects of design in the first place? Why should we spend time understanding our users and thinking about the content, the structure and the behavior of our software? So I think, I think I might be able to answer this question and that's what I'm trying to do today in the rest of the time I have. Now, when I answer the question, I'm not going to talk to you about the return of investment in design or about stock prices or adoption rates or engagement metrics. That's the kind of stuff that designers in the commercial software world are currently using to justify, to answer the question to why should we invest in the non-visual aspects of design? But I think they do not necessarily translate well to the context of free and open source software, so we're going to have to come up with our own answers. And the answer I'm going to use today is actually a little story. I'm going to tell you a story. And this story is about a logo, but it has absolutely nothing to do with software. It has to do with yoga. So two weeks ago, I came back from India. I spent there almost four months and I spent most of the time in a small town in the south of the country called Mysore. And the reason why I bothered to go to that place is to study yoga in this very, very famous school, the Astanga Yoga Nilayah School that was founded by Patabi Yoiz. Now Patabi Yoiz passed away in 2009. His family now runs the show and let me tell you they're doing really well for themselves. The school is incredibly expensive, it's absolutely full, and they're also diversifying their business into new lines. They're entering into new lines of business. For example, they have started to sell yoga apparel. So they sell things like t-shirts and yoga bags. They even sell yoga mugs, whatever that is. And they also sell these things. They are cotton rugs. You see, Astanga Yoga is a particularly sweaty practice. You sweat an awful lot. So if you practice on a standard mat, the rubbery ones, it gets really slippery. So even to stop you from a slippery on your own sweat, which is just disgusting, you put something like this on top and these things are very thick, they're made of cotton and they're like a thick towel, right? So you put that on top of the standard kind of rubbery mat. When the Joyce family created this little side business, they asked one of their students, one of the yoga students who happened to be a visual designer, to make them a logo. And the visual designer came up with this. The visual designer took inspiration from something called the tripundra. The tripundra that this man has on his forehead is a sacred symbol of a branch of Hinduism that the Joyce family happens to belong to. And the founder, the patriarch of the family, Patabi Joyce, often wore that symbol on his forehead. So the Joyce family was delighted with the logo. They loved it because it had the visual, it was really appealing. It referred to the Indian tradition, to the Hindu tradition and to their own tradition as a family that belongs to this particular branch of Hinduism. So they just got really excited and they took this logo, they put it on labels and they proceeded to stitch the labels to all the stuff they sell. To their t-shirts, to their bags, not to their mugs, but also to the rugs, to those cotton rugs. So you can see the logo stitched to the rugs. Only when students started to turn up with these rugs to practice, they realized that they had a little problem. Basically, students were stepping on the rugs and in doing so, they were stepping on the logo and in doing so, they were stepping on the sacred symbol, the tripundra. Now, in Hinduism, feet are considered dirty and stepping on a sacred symbol is one of the most offensive things anybody can do. And here you have hundreds of yoga students stomping, insulting the sacred symbol which in the context of this family and Hinduism was incredibly important. So at this point, you might be wondering why the hell is this lady telling us this story? Because this is exactly what happens when you do visual design only. When you make decisions based exclusively on visual reasons without considering anything else because removing no visual design effectively removes user-centered design. It's when you remove the new visual design rules from a project, what you are removing are the people who think about your software from the perspective of the people who use it. You are removing the people who are skilled at understanding your users and are spotting problems before you build your features. You are removing the people who have been able to tell you that putting the sacred tripundra symbol on a rug on a yoga rug was actually a really bad idea. User-centered design helps us spot problems before we build the software. Why is this important? Well, because once you have stitched the label to the rug once you've made the mistake, the only solution is forcing a workaround upon your users. In this case, the yoga school said you have to rip off the label from your rug otherwise you will not be allowed in. Now the girl's family commands a lot of respect from the students and everybody agreed to do so. But guess what? We do not command the same respect and authority over our users. So enforcing workarounds, forcing workarounds upon our users to compensate for our omissions and misunderstandings simply does not work. Users will vote with their feet and if our software doesn't work for them or forces them to do things that feel unnatural or unconvenient, they will simply abandon our software. That's it. They will lose something else. So this is why it's so important that we think about the non-visual aspects of design. Because user-centered design engages users of software as equal partners, not just of people who are passive elements that receive the technology and use the technology we produce. It engages users as equal partners in the process of making software. Without these true partnerships, without a true shift to user-centered design processes, free and open-source software will never see widespread adoption and it will not stand a chance against commercial software. Now we know that building software from a user-centered perspective is very, very difficult. Heck, I do not for a living. It's bloody hard. But projects need to do it along. That's what the open-source design initiative is for. We are willing to help. So if you are a developer who wants to introduce user-centered practices in their project or you're a visual designer who wants to contribute to your project beyond making logos or color palettes, can you touch? We want to hear from you. Thank you very much. I would just like to say there and please give feedback on the talk if you can and hopefully we have five minutes for questions or so. I don't know, you guys. Okay, that is a really good question. So maybe this is an action we need to take. We need to make sure that our jobs communicate the type of design rules that you can actually request through it. That's an excellent piece of feedback. Thank you very much. User-centered design process at work, ladies and gentlemen. Designers, I think it's a chicken and egg thing but I would like to hear about your opinion. Yeah, this is not a simple reason, right? It's not black or white. Obviously, I think both parts, every part involved in open source software is somehow responsible for the fact that design is simply being understood as the visual aspect. And I think there is a role for education in here and this talk is kind of part of that, I guess. But yeah, I think there needs to be a willingness for things to change. There needs to be a willingness for all parts on all the sites, on all the people that are participating and contributing to free and open source software projects to make this change, to make this true shift to user-centered practices. Does that answer your question? Apart from open source design itself, I don't know, a Victoria. Can we take one more question? Someone was... Absolutely. These logos are incredibly important but not because it's branding, it's because they reinforce the identity of a project. They've seen the contributors themselves. However, logos by themselves are meaningless. So that's what they're trying to say, right? Not trying to dismiss anybody here. I think you guys focusing on logos do an incredibly important job. The problem is that that is not the only aspect of design. I'm going to bring awareness to the audience. Thanks. There is this narrow understanding of design as just the visual aspects, as usability or engaging with users, not being part of it.