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UX

Revision as of 15:32, 1 September 2015 by Julim (talk | contribs) (IRC)

OpenStack User Experience

Mission Statement: Enable OpenStack users to be efficient and make their experience consistent and pleasurable.

User Experience (UX) is community-oriented and available for different audiences on several websites. This wiki serves as an informational source for UX-related activities (workstreams) that goes across multiple OpenStack projects.

UX Workstreams



Getting Started

General Information

UX Program

  • For additional information about OpenStack UX, the programs, team, etc., please refer to the UX Program Proposal.

Mailing List

  • Please feel free to reach out to us via the openstack developer mailing list (openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org). In the subject, use the tag [UX] and we will be sure to see your question/request.

IRC

  • An additional way to get quick feedback or have a discussion with the UX group is to join the IRC channel on freenode #openstack-ux. If you don't get an immediate response, feel free to ask again later or jump over to using the mailing list!



Getting Involved as a Designer

Where can I ask questions or get feedback on my designs?

The team current uses an online tool called Invision to provided feedback on mocks. The best way to get an account is to post a request to the Horizon IRC and someone with admin privileges will grant you access to post your designs.

Generally, you would want to create a project in Invision and upload images to that project. The next step would be to post a link to that design in the Horizon IRC asking folks to provide reviews. The community has been very good about providing reasonable feedback and it's your choice whether or not to incorporate the recommendations.

Where can I ask questions about technical feasibility or understanding the problem space?

The following are various resources and/or places to learn or ask questions related to UX:



Getting Started as a Developer

Are you a developer looking for feedback or help with designing new features? Are you looking for help on improving a current feature?

How does this whole OpenStack contributor thing work anyway?

There is great getting started documentation on openstack.org. How to Contribute is a good place to start.

What's a blueprint in Launchpad?

It's a specification for a feature in OpenStack. In UX, this usually is presented as wireframes or prototypes, but it can be something else. There's lots more info on openstack.org. For the Horizon team, they plan to follow a newly defined Blueprint template for future blueprints.

How do I get involved with OpenStack UX and work on blueprints?

Get started by taking a look at the Contributing Guide. For UX efforts, we track the work that we are doing on our launchpad site[1]. If you aren't ready to contribute your own designs, start off by giving others feedback on launchpad or on AskOpenStack UX.

How do I subscribe to hear about UX-related bugs. How do I know about work that needs UX review or design?

  • Go to the Launchpad main bug page.
  • Click on "Subscribe to bug mail" to the right handside, then "Receive mail for bugs affecting OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) that" -> "are added or changed in any way" -> "Bugs must match this filter" -> "Tags" -> ux.
  • You can choose whether to get comments for individual comments or only on status changes.



What is the process for getting a new design into Horizon?

Assign yourself a blueprint and get to work! When you have something, post a link to your design docs on AskOpenStack UX and ask for feedback. There'll be the usual revisions. Designs that are ready to go can be added to a new or existing blueprint on the Horizon project site. Then, wait for a dev to implement your design. You will be expected to work with developers to answer questions or make updates to your design along the way.
Note: As of November 2014, designs should be posted and shared on UX Designs (for Collaboration and Comments) in Invision.

That's a pretty vague process. Can't you give me a little more detail than that?

Nope, not yet. We're new to this so the process is pretty ad hoc. We'd love your help making it better! Make suggestions.

I don't see a blueprint for the work I want to do. What can I do?

Create a new blueprint! Here is a great guide on creating blueprints[2]. We are now following the Horizon spec template.

User Research & Usability Activities

The community has been actively conducting user research/usability studies. The following are research and results from studies performed to-date:



Patterns & UX Best Practices

Horizon Pattern Document

A pattern library is a collection of design elements that appear multiple times across a site. The intent is to help drive consistency by providing a common set of buttons, tables, workflows for a given interface.

Horizon Pattern Document

Please feel free to edit the document if you would like to add content or make changes!


Horizon Assets Library

The UX Team has created an assets library for Horizon that includes components that would be useful in creating mockups of new designs.

There are current two libraries. The first is a more generic library that includes png images of common components that could be used with virtual any graphics or presentation tool such as Keynote or Ink. The second library was specifically created for Balsamiq (balsamiq.com) and includes groupings as well as components that are native to that specific tool.

Horizon Assets Library



UX Achives and Etherpads

UX Archive

Community Sites (old, in transition)

On mobile applications development read more here.
For User centered UX design read more here.



UX Discussions at OpenStack Summit Etherpads