Welcoming @nonlinear to #Manyverse as a UX/UI designer

It's hard to get designers to contribute to open source apps, and the need has been on my mind lately, when out of the blue nonlinear volunteered to help! In the past weeks, @Dave [ iOS ] and I have been having video calls with nonlinear to kickstart their contributions. nonlinear has both the big-picture design strengths and detailed Figma drawing skills, which is really refreshing to work with, and is frankly exciting! During video calls, I realized there is a constant flow of ideas going on.

nonlinear's first contribution will be in the area of "Recent hashtags" and adjacent concerns, which is important for Patchwork Parity. But it's not about Patchwork Parity alone, there's a lot of high level thinking about how users act (following, blocking, subscribing, muting, tagging) and how SSB content is collectively organized. This work will be important also for upcoming features such as flagging content, "3rd-party content warnings", language tagging and filtering, customizing the public feed, etc.

Here's the first visible outcome, a Figma doc to design the flow for "subscribing to channels" (aka "following hashtags"):

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1090192629575468027

Another concrete outcome is the creation of Design Guidelines on our Wiki. In open source, contributors come and go, and this can be hard for designers because there has to be continuity for the work, we can't have every new designer figure out what were the previous ones doing.

https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/wikis/Design-guidelines

This is a new (and so far short) page that describes Manyverse's design Principles, stating what we are and do, versus what we don't, creating a compass to know whether we're going in the right direction with the design choices we weigh. Then, there's the Themes that are currently used to create consistency in the app's design. I took inspiration in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to write this. Hopefully we flesh out the rest of the document in the near future, taking into account also @Wouter's previous work on UX Research.

Thank you Nicholas Frota (nonlinear) and I'm excited for the next step!

#ux #ui #design #figma

#ux-diary

Last week we held a team meeting to reshuffle the roadmap, and the outcome is this Wiki page (which by the way we'll be using more often to collect design notes): https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/wikis/Road-to-version-1

The "Critical" category contains the usual things we have had since always, such as initial sync performance and onboarding UX. Since @Wouter Moraal worked on a UX project for the onboarding UX, @nonlinear scheduled a meeting with Wouter so we make sure that context and insights aren't lost when transitioning from designer A to designer B.

nonlinear next steps in UI design are still "follow tags", just to dip toes in the UI design and interaction with devs, but after that we'll have a roadmap-centric workflow.