Diverse representations in design and awkward conversations with colleagues

Design & UX often pushes people that need accessible & inclusive products of experiences out of scope. Covering real-life past examples of frustrations from projects that didn’t go well, ones that went well & how I work as much diversity and inclusivity into my work as I can possibly get away with.

When working in design and user experience, people that need accessible and inclusive products of experiences often get referred to as ‘edge cases’ and subsequently pushed out of scope. It’s never easy to convince bosses or colleagues that aren’t themselves ‘edge cases ‘themselves to take the time and spend the resource caring for those that need more diverse design and representation in our visuals.

Covering real-life past examples of frustrations from projects that didn’t go so well, ones that did go well and how I work as much diversity and inclusivity into my work as I can possibly get away with now with the hope to not only make it the standard approach from the companies and people that I work with, but also for the customers and end-users that are not marginalised, to consider that products, services and marketing should be representative for and of everyone, not just them.

Designing attestations UI: The Security and Safety of OSS package supply chain

After working on a 12+ week project looking at how to express in the varied UI's of three package repositories (npm, pypi and RubyGems) we can now see more clearly what developers, across skill and knowledge levels, use in package repository pages to make a decision on the security of an OSS located on a registry. These decisions are critical for better understanding trust, value, social proof and the knowledge of secure practices across developers and helps answer the question: how much do developers know about the security of their software supply chain?

This talk will cover: 1. The essential user research findings from the project, 2. How user research informed the UI style guide design build 3. What gaps and opportunities are here to continue design in the SBOM, Attestations and securing software repositories topics.

https://github.com/ossf/wg-securing-software-repos/tree/main/docs/attestations-style-guide

Designing for security and privacy: Design lessons from human rights and civic technology

Eriol has been working on human rights technology for over 10 years. When we think about how to design for privacy, security and known and unknown human rights, we start with human centred design, using methods and processes that think about what malicious people or governments could do with data, information and access to devices.

Making sure all technology is safe for high risk people to use is critical to the future of private, secure and respectful design that doesn’t rely on dark/deceptive design patterns and brings people into the full knowledge of what their software and hardware does. After all, the value of design is in inclusion of all kinds of users, not just those with privileged access.

Eriol will talk about secure design research practices, how we design for journalists, human rights activists and civil society and how all designers can use methods to make their design more private, secure and resilient against malicious attacks.

45 - 60 mins
Trigger warnings included

Open Source Design Contributions for your OSS project

This short workshop is aimed at getting OSS projects ready for design, usability and accessibility contributions.

Covering the best first issues to attract design contributions and the processes involved in building ‘design ops’ for your OSS project/community.

This workshop welcomes any background, from those new to 'design, those who have some familiarity and experts. The content is designed to be accessible, explorative and pragmatically applicable to various scales of OSS project (including those without a GUI!).

We cover what design can be for a majority of OSS projects, how to set an OSS project up for success from a design perspective and starting out your usability journey in OSS.

Open Source design has a plethora of hurdles to leap before it could become fully adopted by the global design community. Exploitative ‘work for free attitudes’, workflows and how design functions/roles connect up through a product life cycle, how our software doesn’t yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole, is over represented by those with privilege, access and ability.

We’re here to take you through that journey and what we’ve learnt about design contributions to OSS.

Can be done in 1 hour or full day workshops

The secret lives of OSS designers: Understanding designers contributing to OSS

In October 2023 we published findings from 10-16 week diary study that captured insights and contributions from designers actively working on OSS contributions. The diary studies aim was to investigate some of the key questions relating to design in OSS and fill some of the larger systemic “gaps” of information from non-code contributors’ experiences in OSS. There is existing research about designers in open source, but it has focused on analysis of data on issue trackers or interviews with designers.

This session will cover an overview of the study, some of the key learnings and recommendations on how to improve and progress design in OSS.

Mixed into this talk will be overviews and insight into the world of design in OSS tools along with some ways to work with designers in your OSS projects.

30 mins - 60 mins

Open Source Design Panel: Bringing design into OSS

This panel brings together designers from across the OSS contribution experience to discuss how design and OSS can work towards success.
Open Source has historically not seen maintainers or contributors from the design world and design is still something of an unknown within FL/OSS spaces. Though there are many designers that want to contribute to OSS there are plenty of barriers to contribution. This panel brings together designers from across the OSS contribution experience to shed light on how design and open source can work towards a future.