Open collaborative design system

The people you work with is usually what makes a project fun or interesting.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a fun and interesting project mostly because Brian is great to work with.

We didn’t have much time to spend on UX research we came up with some silly pseudo personas to define our interaction. The star been Trever (yes, Trever with an “e”) the trucker, who in my mind looks like a slightly fatter and middle age Kurt Cobain. Sorry Brian, I know you strongly disagree with this description.

Since we work at Red Hat, this project will be open source. That’s why we need to think the API in a way that’s easy to consume to engage better with the community. So we came up with developer personas: Oswald the Open source contributor and Steve the enterprise coder that will consume the project.

Although UX in this project was kinda silly, it made me think about something Eder asked me during QCon Rio: What would a good “UX for developers” talk be.

As always, it comes down to user goals.

If you deal with users, thinking about their experience is critical.

User experience goes way beyond the interface, neither Oswald or Peter will ever see a UI, but we will design the API with their goals in mind. Even Bruno, a hardcore cryptographer, should think about his users every time he write a line of code on Kalium.

We are all here to help our users achieve their goals, it doesn’t matter if you are a designer or a developer (or support, or marketing or PM).

Don’t get me wrong, a user is not a client. Marketing takes care of clients, UX designers (and everyone else) should take care of users. Specially on enterprise applications, where the one that buys the platform is never the one that uses it.

UX designers are lawyers defending the users. Our job is to make sure we all understands our users. And keep them front of mind as we do all of our design decisions, product decisions and productisation decisions all away though the process.

UX for developers

To answer Eders question, I still don’t know what a good UX for developers talk would be. It might be useful for a developer to understand what design thinking is. How to take a user centric approach and how to involve design in every step of the process.

But teaching a developer UX in a 40 min talk is like teaching me java in 40mins (or in 40 years), a complete waste time.