Brussels / 2 & 3 February 2019

schedule

Open Source Design in the trenches: a case study

How we redesigned the FOSDEM video review interface


Early in 2018 I responded to a call for help published in the Open Source Design jobs board (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/). It was from the maintainer of something called SReview (https://github.com/yoe/sreview), which happens to be the software FOSDEM uses to capture, post-process and publish the videos of all the talks at the conference.

Over the past 10 months we redesigned the SReview interface in a user-centred, collaborative, iterative and open way. This talk explains how we went about it. Using a model of the "ideal" design process as a reference, we'll show where we deviated from it and why. The moral of the story? There is no best way of doing design. The best way of doing design is the way that suits your project.

Early in 2018 I responded to a call for help published in the Open Source Design jobs board (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/). It was from the maintainer of something called SReview (https://github.com/yoe/sreview), which happens to be the software FOSDEM uses to capture, post-process and publish the videos of all the talks at the conference.

SReview takes a rather ingenious approach to the problem of how to review presentation videos before publication. Instead of the small video team doing all the work, which would take ages, they crowdsource the task, by asking the speakers themselves to review their own presentations. Speakers get an early preview of the video - something they appreciate -, and the FOSDEM video team gets the job done faster. Everybody wins.

There was only one small problem: the interface speakers had to use to review presentation videos was not working. Speakers kept making mistakes in the process, which caused a lot of extra work for the FOSDEM video team.

Over the past 10 months we redesigned the interface in a user-centred, collaborative, iterative and open way. This talk explains how we went about it. Using a model of the "ideal" design process as a reference, we'll show where we deviated from it and why.

The moral of the story? There is no best way of doing design. The best way of doing design is the way that suits your project.

Speakers

Wouter Verhelst
Belen Barros Pena

Links