In 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open OSS teams understand how design processes and activities improve the usability of open source tools. This post outlines some key themes identifying challenges in OSS design adoption, and introduces the resources created in response to these challenges.
Part two in a series of three blogs. Here we outline part of our research process for the Usable Software Ecosystems Research project. USER is a Sloan Foundation supported research initiative that explores how open source scientific and research software teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects.
In March 2023, Superbloom attended FOSS Backstage conference in Berlin with support from Open Technology Fund. In this blog, we reflect on a design workshop we hosted for non-designers, “Making Design More Open” and share our key learnings and takeaways.
Superbloom will be hosting five sessions at the Mozilla Festival (Monday, March 20 - Friday, March 24 2023). If you’ll be there, we’d love to see you, meet you and get to know you. Come join us! Want to learn how to design a Tech Policy playbook? Are you interested in global tech transparency? Would you like to find out how shadow data affects you? Do you want to understand design’s impact on encrypted messaging? Are you looking for how to center human rights in usability? Join us and 1000s of others at MozFest 2023! This year’s event will be held in person in Amsterdam and online and the Superbloom team will be participating in five of the 360+ sessions. Intrigued? Read more in our post.
In October 2022, Open Technology Fund (OTF) brought together a group of around 50 technologists, researchers, usability experts, and digital security practitioners working on internet shutdowns. Together, the group engaged in many topics, ranging from understanding the lived experience of an internet shutdown to the challenges around technology interventions, and measuring and monitoring networks during a shutdown. An internet shutdown is when access to the internet is restricted, such that people are unable to use the internet or internet based services. This is an information control tactic that is increasingly being used around the world to affect the free flow of information. Our learnings from this session are outlined in this blog post.
Design is all about making decisions. From a rebrand to a feature specification, from a new product to a new logo, every design change presents you with a fresh set of decisions. Personas are a way to help with those decisions.
I’ve been enjoying the videos from AI Now, an exploration of artificial intelligence and ethics hosted by the U.S. White House and NYU’s Information Law Institute. Co-chairs Kate Crawford and Simply Secure co-founder Meredith Whittaker put together a program focused on issues of social inequality, labor, and ethics in artificial intelligence. AI inspiration Looking at the program through a UX design lens, there were abundant design opportunities to make AI systems more effective, transparent, and fair.
If you're new to UX design, wireframing is a powerful tool to understand how users experience your software. People with technical backgrounds benefit from wireframing because it forces them to take a step back from their coding mentality. Rather than focusing on the technical architecture, wireframing exposes the user-experience structure: how the user moves from one screen to another. Example wireframes taken from GoodUI.org. Both show the same content organized with two different structures, but the left wireframe is better because it discloses choices rather than keeping them hidden.