Forgive me for resurrecting this thread, but I saw an interesting blog post called Why designing for open source can be so difficult and a lot of the problems and patterns pointed out in it do feel relatable on some level and touch on some of the topics brought up in this thread.
The case study linked in the article was interesting, and the hacker news comments comments too, with someone from the VLC team (I assume the media player) commenting:
Oh boy, we’re redesigning VLC interface those days, and does this article is spot on on numerous part we’ve seen.
- A lot of things are not-intuitive, and we’ve had to do basic UX and looking at our users to understand what the needs where (we don’t use telemetry/spying). And it took a lot of time…
- And yes, this requires to rethink some of the basics stuff for VLC usage.
- And the nerd-porn part is very true: we solved it with 3 layers of access. Simple usage should be direct, Advanced usage for normal users should be within 2 clicks, and Geek/Pro options can be further away.
And we will have options for different usage of VLC that will impact a bit the UI (but we’re making that as simple as possible, to not make the codebase too complex → more time)- Finally, a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work.
I can share some of the work, if some people care…
It was a good reminder for me that our problems are not unique and are shared across many other open-source teams! Its always interesting to hear how other teams approach them and if anyone does hear how problems similar to ours are being solved elsewhere please do share here or elsewhere on the forum 