Hi all,
in the "Design Team Needs ..." thread, I read many statements,
proposals, assumptions, ... how our work relates to certain topics.
Since I lost track a bit (or better, I'd like to keep the connected
things in one reply), I'd like to provide my proposal that is based on
some year's experience in a company and the OOo community.
Before I start, I would like to base my statements on the following...
What we currently do is, that we try to assign certain topics to teams.
Teams that consist of people who share interest, knowledge and
experience concerning a given topic (e.g. promotion). That also leads to
better focus wrt to these topics, better visibility within the
community, and better assignment of responsibilities.
As some of you mentioned - yes, sometimes the topics have some overlap.
This doesn't mean that avoiding teams at all helps to improve efficiency
and effectivity :-) So the "magic" is, how to separate the work items -
who is responsible for what, what work item is dependent on another one
(e.g. owned by another team), and how to coordinate collaboration.
There are also some more constraints - e.g. recommended size of a team,
availability of people interested in certain topics, infrastructure
requirements, best practices ...
To quote an example how that might work (especially since I've noticed
some statements like Artwork belonging to Marketing - unsuitable for
diverse activities like ours): Marketing defines the marketing strategy,
defines "how we present ourselves" and who we do target (target user
base). Visual Design is responsible for the visual branding basics and
also for the product branding. They also provide artwork to the Website
team. User Experience supports (right from the beginning) to make sure
that the "deliverables" like graphics, the website, ... are usable,
accessible and do support the workflows of the target users.
Thus, everybody has it's "home" sharing tools and methods. But finally
we work together - I still appreciate the I-Teams idea by OOo to foster
efficient collaboration. But here we talk about the broader
structure ... to make a long story short(er).
STRUCTURE
The LibreOffice Marketing Team and the LibreOffice Design Team are two
entities. The latter provides sub-groups for "User Experience Design"
and "Visual Identity Design".
This structure is reflected by the topics and also by the use of the
infrastructure.
TOPICS (Proposals)
User Experience Design
* Credo: "Make it just work ..."
* Keywords: Utility (Productivity), Usability, Accessibility, ...
* Responsible for: User Research, Ideation / Brainstorming,
Feature Design, ...
* Supports: Development Team, Website Team, Marketing Team, QA
Visual Identity Design
* Credo: "... and look great"
* Keywords: Visual Design Elements and Artwork
* Responsible for: Visual Branding for Product (including UI),
Website, ...
* Supports: Product Development Team, Website Team, Marketing
Team, (Template Team), ...
Thus, Marketing can focus on things like: product (and community)
strategy, promotion (including promotion material), public relations,
events organization, product benchmarking, ...
Comment: Thorsten stated that "Visual Identity" might work better than
"Visual Design", so I extended it to "Visual Identity Design". That
helps to emphasize what it is about, links to the Design Team, and helps
to avoid misunderstandings (of the past) what UX is about.
INFRASTRUCTURE
As far as I can see, there is no need for a dedicated Design section
within the official website - except e.g. things like requests for
contribution and collaboration. "Just" our results will be communicated
by the software itself, and the website.
The recently set up design mailing list should suite our needs as well.
No (urgent) need to further refine the mailing list structure.
For the wiki, there have been several proposals including best practices
how to shape the titles (URLs). Based on these proposals and the
structure, I do propose:
* Design: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design
* UXD: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/UXD
* VID: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/VID
Categories applied are "Design" (in any case), and "User Experience
Design" and "Visual Identity Design".
One reason for keeping the UXD and VID items in a common "tree" is, that
we share some common information. Refined target user descriptions
(personas), or tooling are some of them ... Here is an example of the
OOo UX tooling page I've created, maybe that helps to understand what I
am thinking about :-) [2]
Well, that's it ... reasonable?
Here, people's experience is important for me in this case. We'll
benefit from the knowledge of those who already know about / worked on
the variety of topics within Marketing, Visual Design, User
Experience, ... and how to bring that together in a FLOSS project. That
would greatly streamline the discussion :-)
Cheers,
Christoph
[1] http://go.mail-archive.com/ydqk5WiiUNqdBoFaX6Jc5bVW6r8=
[2] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/Tools
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