 So, hi everyone. My name is Mirek Mazul, I hope you can hear me okay. I'm doing a talk on starting the new score design team. It's more of a talk on what's to come than what has been because it's just starting out. So, what is new score? New score is the score writing program where you can write scores, edit scores, share scores. It has an online platform as well that you can share scores to and that you can download scores from. So, my goal wasn't just to start a design team for new score. It was also to figure out how to do user-centered design effectively in volunteer-based communities. I used to be a volunteer in the user experience design team for LibreOffice. So, I had some experience with that and I feel like consistently not just with LibreOffice but with various open-source design teams, one thing that felt like was missing was the user. There was not enough research being done. There often wasn't a solid basis for some decisions being made. A lot of designers were making decisions based on their own experience without doing research and I haven't really seen user research being done on a larger basis in open-source projects. I'm also working part-time as a user experience designer. I'm studying some subjects in human computer interactions so I was coming from that as well and this is a book that I was basing a lot of the processes that I tried to incorporate and then I'm gonna try to incorporate into the design team. It's designing for the digital age. It was written by Kim Goodwin who used to be vice president at Cooper. Cooper is one of the largest and most famous design consultancies and it's a really huge book and it's very detailed and it goes through the entire process of user experience design, user-centered user experience design. So when I say user-centered design, what do I mean? Well Wikipedia defines it as a framework of processes in which the needs, wants and limitations of end users are given extensive attention at each stage. That means that you do research at the beginning then that research, you usually have personas which are, you take the data from that research and make fictional, fictional people, fictional characters that exemplify the patterns that you found in that research that you did. And then once you start designing, you test, you keep testing, you validate hypotheses, you make sure that what you're making is being actually useful to the people that you're making it for and you keep the personas in mind throughout the whole process. Why is this important? Well it lets everyone understand the needs, the workflows and the mental models of the people involved in whatever you're designing. So that basically makes you able to understand what different kinds of people are using your software. It's not just you, it's not just your surroundings, it makes you aware of who all is using your software and it also gives you a better perspective on what the needs are. You're not just copying competition. It gets the whole team thinking about the target users. It makes it clear who the target users are and aren't. You know who you're designing for. There's a concept called the elastic user which is basically sometimes you hear arguments from developers, oh we need, I don't know, we definitely need a wizard for this because it's just too hard but then at other times oh it's fine you know they'll figure it out because they're clever and then they can look through documentation right and so you have these opposing views on who the user is and it's the same user and you're designing, you know, you have a very schizophrenic interface if you're designing that way. The personas help you keep grounded on who the actual users are going to be and what their needs are and it resolves arguments. So if you have data to back up your arguments then it's much easier to resolve them. I'm not sure what I did there, sorry. And it also helps you keep a leg up on the competition because you actually know the needs you're not just copying blindly what the others are doing. So what I tried to do is get a local meetup running. First of all I wasn't really experienced with running something locally. I've only been a volunteer in web based design communities and there were a lot of inefficiencies in doing things on the web and communication and setting time so I was wondering what's it going to be like if you do it locally. So I started a meetup on meetup.com. The idea was to you know start with research, start doing research as a first step, get some personas as I mentioned and then once we have the personas ready the personas would be the basis of everything and inform all the design going forward. We just start solving user experience problems. You know we do some, the process was you do some testing at the beginning or you look for some hypotheses or you know people would have some ideas of what the bugs were. Maybe you have some bugs in the bug tracker. You do research and ideation for you know the bugs that you identified. Then you use your personas and put them in the sudden scenarios in which they're running into this bug and try to find solutions for personas in those scenarios. Then you do some wireframes. You test those. Maybe you go to mock-up phase and test on the mock-ups themselves because sometimes you don't need wireframing phases. It's easier sometimes to just do the mock-ups and then we do testing and once we figured out oh okay this works for people we move on to the next bug. So really a straightforward process that can be applied not just in U-Score but in other communities as well. So how did it go? So it didn't go that well and it was partly because I didn't really have that much time to devote to it. So this is the first meeting where we set up you know what it's going to be like or we talked about what our plans are with vision is and that was nice. But then the next meeting I had a set of four completely different people. So I didn't expect the base to be quite so changeable but it still kept going. You know we did the next time there were four of us some from the first meeting some from the second meeting and we did some stakeholder interviews to find out what the stakeholders were looking for who the users were etc. And then the next meeting we had six people that was the busiest one I think. I think this is it and we were still doing stakeholder interviews we were talking about the user experience design process in general. It seemed to be working relatively well. People seem to be motivated because these people they were coming into it because they wanted to learn the user experience design process. They didn't really have experience with it. So it was interesting to them but at the same time they didn't have that much time to devote which actually showed up afterwards. We were starting to do user research prep and there weren't that many people coming. First the next meeting one meeting had to be cancelled. The next meeting two people came and we just talked about user research and then the meeting afterwards we started preparing for user research you know who we could where we could find people what people are we looking for etc that kind of stuff. And that last meeting was kind of a bit disorganized so it might have discouraged people because nobody came the next time and then the next time again nobody came and I wasn't really willing to devote the time to to it I had school I had work so I put it on hiatus for a while and then started in January started up again in January and it was kind of lukewarm it started out a bit slow but at the same time we were able to have a meet-up we did do three interviews in January. There were some problems with the interviews so that makes me actually inspired to do more work in terms of teaching people how to do user interviews putting more effort into resources because the interviews that we had were more marketing driven and more focused on the current software rather than the users. So that's where you are now. Lessons learned. Well I learned that people really need resources then that it's there's a shortage of quickly digestible resources for people to use and people to get involved right away. If I show people designing for the digital age it's such a huge complex work that it discourages them from contributing so what I'd like to do now is put more time and effort into into the resources that there are and trying to find resources so if you have any tips let me know. So another thing volunteers come and go I can't count on those same people to keep contributing. I have to be prepared for new people coming in and how to integrate them as fast as possible. Maybe some easy hacks would be would be good to get people integrated. People sign these pressures so you really need to also focus on motivation and keeping them feeling like their time is being used as well as possible. And the people that are coming are generally inexperienced so you really do need to teach them how to do user experience design. These people that were coming to the need ups were also not experienced in music. Music theories so that's also something to keep in mind when you're working with a local group you're less likely to find if you have specialized software people who are interested in that specialized software so that's where online communities really have the upper hand because it's easier to find people. So going forward I'm going to be gathering resources making more resources. I'm going to be trying to build a stronger community something that I was missing was another person to help me keep the things going because I really was running out of time. I didn't really have the time to devote to this and it would be helpful to have someone else. So if there's anyone here who'd like to get involved let me know. Especially if you're more experienced but even if you're not there's lots of stuff to do. And I'd like to actually do a mix of offline and online communities because both are useful. I'd like to define the roles better something that as I've mentioned I don't really see user research being done often and researchers can actually have a different set of skills than your standard interaction designer and that's something that you could use different people for. If somebody isn't comfortable making wireframes, isn't comfortable going through layout and graphic theory, they can do this, they can ask questions, they can gather data, they can make personas. That's completely different and I think in the open source world relatively unexplored role that we could have. Also research participants, you don't have to know anything, you can just participate in interviews and we absolutely need those people so if you have no skills and can talk then you're perfect for open source volunteering. And there's different stuff, visual designers of course, field experts, people who know the domain, interaction designers, motion designers as well. And I'd like to reiterate on the process a bit more. I mentioned the process before. Now I'm also thinking about doing Lean UX so in Lean UX instead of doing research up front and then making personas from that you do proto personas based on your assumptions of who the users are going to be and then you validate them, then you basically grow them into full blown personas. So you start with the fictional characters but over time they get validated through actual research. The benefit of that is we can start working on the bugs right away with an idea of who the users are and then we'll refine the personas over time. And I want to aim for replicability because I'd really like other open source communities to also focus more on user research. And if that's something that you'd like to do in your community we could connect up and find ways to incorporate user research and testing basically user centered design into an existing design team or into a new design team if you'd like to start one. So let me know your thoughts. This is my email address and I'd like to take comments, questions, thoughts right now if you have any. Right, so the question was why a mix of offline and online communities. I think the advantage of offline communities can be, well you have stronger bonds it's easier to coordinate and it's also easier if you're going to be conducting user interviews then ideally you'd have two people at user interviews want to take notes, want to ask questions so that each person can focus a bit and the person taking notes can fill in if the other person doesn't know what to ask. And that's always easier to coordinate locally. Oh yeah, yeah. I think online only has certain advantages of its own. It's easier to find volunteers. The fall volunteers tend to be more motivated because they're coming online, they may be associated with the software itself so there are definite advantages to doing it online as well and you can still do local interviews but generally alone. Prague, this was in Prague. Czech Republic. So the frequency based on the first meetings that I had, how frequently others felt like they could devote time to this and it was also partly based on my schedule because I'm working, I have school, so I needed to coordinate these things and it turned out to be, the idea was to have it once a week but then sometimes it fell through because some people couldn't go, I sometimes couldn't go. So that's how we decided. So the question is with Lean UX, if there's a danger of just incorporating the stuff from the proto personas or just the proto personas being very much like influencing the course of the research and I agree with you. That's actually why I didn't do Lean UX at first because that's something that does concern me. If you do research afterwards and start with proto personas you're more likely to, your final personas are more likely to be like the original proto personas. That said it does have the advantage of you being able to start right away on fixing user experience bugs and not having to worry about that. So this is something that you need to keep in mind while doing the research. I'm not sure if there's an easy solution but really try to be objective when incorporating that research in. When you were looking for your volunteers did you look for people who were already familiar with Moonscore from the Moonscore community or were you looking for people who launched it in UX? So the question is when I was looking for volunteers was I looking for people interested in Moonscore or people interested in UX? Good question. So I just started Meetup and I was kind of free-balling it so it was more like people who are interested in open source or user experience design I tagged this event on Meetup.com using these various tags music as well and the people that came generally came from generally were interested in user experience design and weren't experienced in it and the thing that motivated them in coming to the Meetups was learning how to do user experience design. I'm not sure if that was because of the description of the project if people interested in music didn't feel like they could get involved. I'm not sure but it attracted the user experience newbie crowd. Any other thoughts, comments, questions? Any recommendations on how to do user-centered design or any knowledge about other projects that have incorporated this in a volunteer based way? If you design personas you have to make both of them. I'll just repeat that so the tip was to keep everything documented to have the personas and the user research findings on the wiki. So the tip was that to make videos as well because for some people more easy to digest. Either proto-personals, I guess proto-personals in particular but also error-personals how useful it is because a lot of people are uncomfortable with them but on the other hand like a lot of projects they always have this like the user they talk about they wouldn't use like the personas right but they're like oh the user would do this the user would do that so all projects always use them anyway just that they call the personas the user. Just to repeat that the comment was that he and Andreas and Garrett a colleague were debating whether personas make sense how useful they are and especially proto-personals if they're useful at all but at the same time we refer to persona whenever we're doing design even if we don't have personas we keep using the word the user you know the user would like this the user would like something so in our heads there is a persona we just don't get down and I agree with that and I think personas are useful I think they get a bad rap because oftentimes what you see are proto-personals that don't really have any bag that aren't bagged by research so it's yeah so you could have elastic the elastic user problems so because you don't really have a person to actually work from