 Mary so my background started out as I just graduated about a year ago with the bachelor's in graphic design and a bachelor's in mathematics initially was gonna go into math education so teach math to high schoolers but I kind of really fell in love with design earlier on in high school and early in college so I decided to give this path a try started out at Red Hat as an intern this summer after my sophomore year of college and then kind of came back as an intern every summer after that so three years an intern one year a full-timer so now I'm on the UXD team as a full-time visual designer. I'll just use the one I know works okay. Hi I'm Stacy McAuliffe and I'm a content strategist on our UX team I started off I got my masters in professional writing I have a bachelor's in fiction writing and never thought that there would be a place in tech for me as a writer but it turns out that there is so I started as a tech writer at IBM and IBM went through this pretty massive design transformation UX ended up being the forefront of everything that we did and I found it super fascinating started working with the UX team more frequently on micro copy copy in the UIs and just discovered how important good content can be for UX to improve just user experience in general and how helpful it was for me as a tech writer to understand user problems and the business problems that we were trying to solve so that I could write better documentation and started as the UX writer and content strategist at Red Hat about a year and a half ago. Hi so I'm I'm Sarah Chisari UX researcher I have been working with the team for about three years now I started as a computer science students like I was a bachelor in computer science and then I shifted my focus to human computer interaction in my master degree then I started working as a instructional designer where I was supposed to design like course materials for students that I had no idea who they are and if this material is gonna work for them so that was the kind of inspiration for me to switch to user experience research where I wanted to learn about the users and how things we design is gonna work for them and how they perceive it so that's why I started doing my PhD in human content traction and information science and I took my PhD and I become a researcher the PhD took me about five years and it's been about three years that I've been working as a UX researcher with the team. That's about me. So yeah I just wanted to give you brief information about our team Red Hat UX team right now is about a hundred and six people and I joined in 2014 and at that point we had 18 people so it's been a huge change over the last five years and it's interesting that our group is actually 50 50 men and one versus women so it's pretty pretty cool place to be. We have some pre like listed questions that we're gonna ask first and then we'll open it up to audience if people have any other questions so I'm gonna start with what does it take to be perceived as open source UX and I'm gonna ask Cat that question. I'm attributed to an open source project so I'm not sure how much of you guys know about Red Hat but we have an open source design system which is pattern fly which all of our group is actually included in so that's one aspect of open source but I'm wondering if Gina could start by answering that. And Sarah Chisari, you want to talk about research? So a little bit about research so what I only do at Red Hat or any other jobs that I got as a research is just to get feedback or collect feedback from users. So in the context of open source things are a bit different than other contexts so there are two maybe three major project that I worked on so far open source ones and one is a pattern fly one that Gina and Colleen mentioned. For pattern fly what I do is basically try to see what community says so and the difference between open source and other companies that as a researcher you got a that the research request really comes from the product manager or the designer they first come to you and say okay I have these questions and I want to know the answers so in open source we have that like that's one part of it but the other major part is that a lot of these feedback or some of these requests are coming from the communities so the community of designers or developers specifically for pattern fly they they adopt pattern fly in their own way they use it in their own way and they as users they come to us and say okay we use it and these are the issues that we found so can you guys like you know dig more into it and see what we can do about it so I think the difference for me like as a researcher in open source was this type of interaction so getting direct feedback from the community and those firsthand experience from the customers or the users were the most valuable ones to me at least because I know they are real and they are not the thing that we guesstimate there's a real problems that that people in the community encountered and that's what we have to focus on because that came from real people I think that's a little bit about research with pattern fly thank you next questions how can you get involved in open source projects based on your background so how you can get involved so again when it comes to research all I care about is feedback from users so if you guys like if any of you guys are interested in research one thing you can do is just to become the researcher while being a user so basically what I do as a researcher is that I talk to users and see what are their problems but basically the feedback comes from the user so if you are one of those users the best thing you could do is just share your feedback like share whatever experience you have with the product with whatever you're doing with the rest of the community and see what they think of so that's the best way of actually doing the research like you know being community see if you are the only person who has a problem or if there's any other person having the same problem and try to do your own research to see what was wrong and and then just try to to make it visible to the team who actually brought that thing so again a specific pattern fly we have github so people can just go in and just adding issues that they encountered that's when we get involved with research so just just showing the feedback that you have with experience that's that's wonderful I would say there are so many other communication methods that we have we have this mainly this we have pattern fly a phone we have pattern fly slack this is like open to public so I would say the main part of research is gathering feedback and you guys like whoever is the user sharing the feedback with the community is the most valuable part of it and so instead of me going to the user asking them to share the feedback with me if they do it themselves it's just like it's just easier job for me basically and it's just much more valuable because it's coming directly from them so I would say get involved show your experience don't be shy honestly if you encounter something the main thing I tried to do whenever I do research is that I tell the participant that you are not the focus of this study or research the the focus is to understand the usability of the product so if something is not working for you is not it doesn't mean that you will have some problem or it's you that have the lack of knowledge it's most probably the product that we developed has some problem so feel free to share anything that comes to your mind and again that's the best type of feedback that you could that we could actually gather so don't be shy and just speak out and just share whatever experience that you have so again as a writer I would never have thought of open source is a place that like needed my skill set but it is definitely an awesome place if you're a writer to contribute open source is all about community getting people involved getting people invested and I think the messaging around your project can help draw people in I think if you're a writer you can help in so many ways you can help clarify messaging for projects you can help improve documentation and help improve usage for the projects I just think as a writer anywhere that you see areas that are confusing I didn't understand what to do next if you have a skill set in technical writing helping with processes and procedures on the website can be super helpful and just like Sarah said like don't get nervous I think the teams are super receptive to any help with writing because especially I know developers are not really amped a lot of the time to write it's not their favorite thing obviously not in all cases but yeah I think if you have writing chops and you're noticing things that can be improved you can absolutely help in that area yeah so I'm actually gonna take a step back and think about this from the non pattern pattern fly perspective so my first two years in turning here I was on a super technical engineering team so I was on the Fedora engineering team so finding a place that was kind of like my sweet space as like more visual graphical person was not exactly an easy feat so I did could do a little bit of digging in order to find kind of where I could make use in that open source population so I think you know beyond pattern flying beyond actual just straight-up design resources really any upstream community especially an open source you know we all kind of know that open source isn't exactly known for having the most beautiful user interfaces a lot of times they would really benefit from having someone take a look at some of those components for them so you know whether it's upstreams that are you know specific to an app so everything that redhead does it starts out as you know an open source project first so all of us work within those groups but even you know Fedora was an open source operating system but in order to be that it needed to gain speed and they had marketing events so they had an entire design team that was pretty much all international and gave a really good opportunity to kind of communicate with people who I wouldn't normally get design feedback from and that's a really unusual place to find design opportunities I think when you actually look deep into the tech and realize that sometimes they have a need that they don't always advertise as well so there is you know this marketing need this need for helping them build out their brand so from a graphics perspective that was a cool space for me to find and like everyone said a lot of these upstream communities because they're always looking for more contributors they have a lot of ways to get in touch with them I think sometimes finding out how to get in touch with you know the groups that you want to do design work for content rating for can be a really hard first step but you know if you just go right to the root even if it's just Fedora project org you know you can see they have all these ways to get in contact and chances are if you just contact someone whoever's on the receiving side of that mailing list or you know just on the receiving side of something even a tweet there's probably someone out there who could send you through this big chain of go talk to this person who knows this person who might somehow know a design person you'll get there and you'll learn and meet some really cool people along the way thanks the next question is there how does communication and open source different okay all right I guess okay all right I'm gonna go now so communication and open source I think in a lot of ways the actual things that you're communicating are the same as they would be at you know any proprietary company you know you're still collaborating with others just you're still you know figuring out where everyone's at so you can come to the best solution but I think how that collaboration communication works and how open the pipelines are a little bit different in open source so we always joke about memo list and how rare it is an open source company for people to kind of not have to gauge what they say as much and you know you can kind of say things and you know voice opinions that you otherwise might be a little bit more censored to say before so I think you get much more like raw information and raw thoughts from people which at first can be jarring but you end up was you end up getting a stronger result because you have true like you know valid opinions from people not ones where people you know were tiptoeing around what they actually thought and I think also with open source not being you know this confined here's the only people that I talked to an open source we have the ability to communicate with everyone so you get the perspectives of people that you normally wouldn't get and both within the UX team and the previous team I was on you know a lot of the populations of people were not had a culture really really differently than mine so I think even that cultural piece is really interesting to think about with the communication even how people communicate based on their culture is different the amount of like directness versus indirect communication was interesting to see and I think just a good skill to learn which I think you know is a result of the open source culture overall like I don't think I would have been able to effectively communicate with people who communicated differently than me if it wasn't for open source kind of forcing me to look a little bit deeper and ask really concise questions and ask people questions that may have seemed kind of stupid to them but it I think proved helpful and actually getting to the root of things so I think that having it no limit to who and where and how you're communicating with people is a big differentiating factor between open source and not open source workplaces so I'm gonna take a little bit of a different approach to answering the question and one of the things that I do for pattern fly is help with communicating with the community so blogging and I found compared to some of the proprietary companies that I've worked for communications for an open source project it's so much more important to communicate rationale communicate decision-making communicate everything that you're doing in a way that supports open collaboration and feedback from the community and then also really being sensitive to the fact that you have this community of folks who are super invested in what you've been doing and there are going to be times where not everybody agrees with decisions that have been made so I think blogging has been very interesting and then also the messaging on our website just again being super sensitive to the fact that it's a community we want people involved we want feedback we want everybody to have their hands in it and have accountability and be invested in it and I think it just does impact all the messaging and other ways that we talk about everything that we we put into the into the universe into the community can you articulate the differences between working in open source and open source seems like your previous job open it up to any questions from the audience if anybody's has any questions I can start I think so one of the things I was going to say is trying to evaluate the feedback and I'm assuming that Sarah will be able to speak to this better than me but like literally like finding the trends between what you have and then trying to prioritize from that do you want to expand on that so what we usually do is just to do research based on the feedback we got so it's not like we take all the feedback and we act on every single of them so usually we taking the feedback and we try to go back to the rest of the community and the rest of the users and see what's the prevalence there so it's not just like and it's not it's not gonna be feasible honestly you can actually act on every single feedback that you get from the community the best I would recommend is just to do your own research on the feedback you got doesn't mean that that feedback is not usable is not good it just for the sake of prioritization and just making sure that you are on track and the strategy you're taking makes sense to everyone on the team on the product team and also the community is best to do your own research based on like using the feedback you got so anything that we do any feedback that comes from the community we will see if they shared with me and I try to go and just write a test plan based on the feedback we got to see like basically to address the exact question of the problem that the user wrote up and then we're going to look at yeah where was the what's the prevalence really out there like yeah this group of people thought it's this is a problem but is that a problem for the rest of the community or the rest of the users so and there are lots of ways you can do it it's not just like so the feedback you get might be just a small piece of yeah text or quality of feedback but you can take that feedback and put it in different contexts in different using different methods you can either continue talking to other users in the community you can put that question or like you can put that question into a survey and send it to a much larger population there's so many different things that you don't know the fun methods that you can try just to understand what's the prevalence mainly and how important that issue is just a bit of commercial if you guys are interested to know what type of these research people know about the methods that you can try definitely can check out our booth in the exhibition hall there are at least like seven or eight research activities going on there so it's a really great way to just get some exposure to what type of research I'm talking about a lot of engagement a lot of conversation between the researcher and the user and again a great experience just to see how we do research in open source but yeah I would say my only recommendation would be just do another round of research based on the feedback you got and just see what's the frequency or what's how important that issue is yeah I think it's also interesting because open source has so many people that are so passionate that if you even just hold one usability study with one customer it's like you could almost be convinced by what they're saying to you because they're so passionate but like making sure that all gets put into perspective is really important thank you any other questions specifically to information architecture but I know so what we've tried to do in pattern fly with pattern fly four is recraft our design documentation so that we're not only putting components out there but we're creating documentation that helps you understand what patterns you should use where and why you might use them so why would I use like a list versus a table why would I use this chart versus that chart so kind of helping designers and developers have more of an understanding of the rationale behind why you would choose a specific design pattern over another and just a shameless plug for content or also we put content guidelines and for pattern fly so how to write better for user experience how to write better for components and I do help that I think that that helps with discoverability encouraging people to think about content design with words I think that helps just naturally with information architecture when you're considering language first like how does my user understand this problem yeah can you hear me yep all right this is a perfect Todd question thank you Todd so if we if we knew how to give everybody perfect information architectures as a UX industry there'd be a whole lot of way more usable applications out there so I think as an industry that is that's part of the value that UX practice brings and I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution it really depends on the application you're building who the users are what they're trying to accomplish and that's how you have to organize your information and that's the special sauce so I don't think we can build that into a pattern library in any way shape or form yeah I was just gonna say similarly I think we've tried to tackle it a little bit from the UX perspective but at the at the product level almost to try to do not as much a one-size-fits-all but provide some type of conventions that almost sit on top of the design library so you you know you have a pattern fly where it's at the component level and you're using these standards so look and feel you know it sits the same across products but you also have something that sits on top of that design system where you have conventions that are really specific to a product and we're trying to really do a better job of documenting those conventions at the product level to say here's the cases where we use a modal versus a in-page form or here's when we use a wizard versus a progressive form type of thing here's what our toolbars look like in this product for these views so kind of getting more specific not to say that these those other views aren't great maybe for another product but I think providing some type of documentation especially in the open source community kind of your your conventions to explain to help somebody who's trying to contribute stay within that framework I think you do have to yet document some of that and provide those guidelines but yeah it's it's hard with just a component I agree yeah and I was just going to say it's also I think the industry is changing so quickly like a lot of times we're just trying to get products out to market and make it usable so you know at some level we have to make a best guess the beginning to get something out to market quickly there's other areas of the product where we might be able to spend more time and we have more ability to create a better than to have an experience but it's not always like that right okay so I'm a researcher so obviously my answer to any question is just to do research so but honestly in this context this is really good question because so yeah there are a lot of frameworks out there a lot of say like he restricts or a lot of say you know those practices and design guidelines out there and other things that we introduce in pattern flare based on those but my recommendation would be yes those are the things that we thought will work for many people or for many users but they're not tested in multiple different contexts so honestly what you need to do is just yeah as soon as you adopted this framework you will need to do your own research to see so you're in your own context does that does that make sense so yeah my recommendation would be just again just do research because not that we can't actually test this component in every possible context that would exist out there this is not possible and an in-context experience could be really different than out of context explaining for sure so all of this recommendation are mostly out of context recommendations so definitely do research in context to see if these things that we recommend that worked in your context and get back to us I mean if it doesn't work let us know and that would be really nice feedback for us see that is zero i think that's a zero okay well thanks everybody for attending if you guys want to talk to us most of us are going to be in the usd booth throughout saturday so thanks very much