[Openstack] [Horizon] UX Discussions - proposal for better organization, rising activity and awareness

Jaromir Coufal jcoufal at redhat.com
Wed Jun 12 04:51:53 UTC 2013


Hello Everybody!

my name is Jarda (shortening from Jaromir) and I'm working on Horizon in 
a way of improvement the UX. Couple of weeks ago, there was set up 
community on Google+ to group UX related people to discuss designing 
issues. I think it was really great idea to start this effort and I love 
to see all people interested in helping Horizon being a better place. 
However, Google+ posts and discussions don't work very well for broader 
discussions about design issues, and I'd like to state here few examples 
of why I think so:
- Comments are very narrow (worse readability, long comments are really 
bad supported).
- Comments don't include images support.
- There is no way where to store supportive materials.
- Nobody knows what issues are resolved, what are still active.
- No possibility to search for related topic (was this already 
discussed? Am I the first one to ask this?).
- Notifications are also not from the best ones (activity of members 
just slipped down); not big awareness.

... and I have little bit more troubles with using it for design 
discussions.
But long story short - I'd like to propose using GitHub for storing 
documentation and starting discussions related to UX of OpenStack (Horizon).

In my opinion the best way to deal with UX in Horizon is to create a 
GitHub repository "user_experience" within OpenStack account, store 
related documentation in there and use GitHub Issues for discussions. 
Here are some benefits:
* You can get subscribed to the repositoryor even just issue you are 
interested in, so you get notifications on your mail or just online 
(whatever works for you).
* Issues are grouping topics very well together so the discussion for 
the topic stays at one place and everything is connected.
* Once the issue is solved we can close it (and it is archived).
* Issues have quite good options for text formatting.
* You can past image directly to the post.
* You can upload bigger temporary supportive materials to your forked 
repository.
* The upstream repository itself can work as a good place to store UX 
documentations for Horizon (wireframes, documents, guides, etc).
* What goes to the repository itself goes through pull-request process 
so we can make sure that there are ideas which were publicly discussed 
and accepted.

Also, it provides better accessible way for any contributor, who is 
having some UX related issue. Since "user_experience" repository would 
be placed among other projects, it will be very easy to notice it and 
find this place if I need such a help. So, it is more likely, that we 
will increase activity and get more ideas together, also we enhance 
connecting developers and design people together, if both are 
contributing. I see UX as another project under OpenStack, though - sure 
- little bit different type of project, but still a project. And if we 
manage to get this project active we will definitely enhance resulting 
UX of Horizon, which is a goal.

What do you think about this idea? Any thoughts? I'd be very happy to 
help with setting this up so it works smoothly.

Best
-- Jarda
jcoufal at #openstack-horizon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/attachments/20130612/4f51545c/attachment.html>


More information about the Openstack mailing list