SCaLE 6X: Interview with Celeste Lyn Paul

Free/Open Source software has grown considerably from its roots in the UNIX tradition of the command line interface and early X Windows-based graphical environments. As desktop use has increased concurrently with advances in desktop development, serious user interface and experience issues have arisen.

Celeste Lyn Paul of User Centered Design, Inc. and the KDE Project presented, "A Quick and Dirty Intro to User Centered Design in Open Source Development," Saturday at SCaLE 6X. Her talk emphasized the importance of including designers in the development process.

LinuxWorld: You advocate designer involvement and by extension user centered design in the development process. How difficult do you find integrating designers with developers?

Celeste Lyn Paul: It's actually not easy. It's mostly an experience issue. If you're a developer and you have never worked with a designer or even worse if you're not aware of design methods and don't know what to expect it causes a lot of friction. However, I think it's more difficult for designers who have never worked with developers before.

Developers and designers are different types of people with different vocabularies. Miscommunication and misunderstanding are a problem. People work in Open Source because they love it. As I said in my talk, both developers and designers can be temperamental, and that can make it hard to work together. But, the developers were there first, and designers can't think they can barge in and take over.

LW: As an advocate are you making headway?

CLP: I think so. I think educating developers on design issues is the first step. They like challenges. This is particularly true of Open Source developers. "Show me how," is usually their response. As a designer, although a developer can demonstrate coding to me, I would have a much more difficult time taking that instruction and contributing code to a project.

The transition of user focus from, "for developers by developers," to slowly spreading out to all of these other people who are interested has had more of a staying effect on how usability evolved in Open Source. A lot of developers are now thinking about all of these other people who are using their software.

Even if they do not know any of the User Centered Design methods I presented in my talk, just having the frame of mind that there are other people out there who are not like me who are using my software has made a difference over the past few years.

LW: Your own design stack, is it all Open Source or a mix?

CLP: For my work laptop, I run KDE. Image manipulation is a large part of my work, and there is GIMP and Krita for that. However, the one thing I just can't live without is Axure, a specialized interaction design tool. It's pretty new, but it's a .Net 3 application, and there isn't full .NET 3 support yet for Linux.

LW: What is the user interface design element you dislike the most?

CLP: Tabs are the most problematic widget, because they have inconsistent context of use such as tabs in a browser window versus tabs in a dialog box. What's happening on the desktop is that we're integrating a lot of Internet interactions. People are comfortable with them because of how much they use the Internet. We find problems trying to merge client software ways of interacting with those of the Internet because the expectations are so different.

LW: What is the user interface design element you are happiest with?

CLP: One of the newest widgets in QT4 is a combo button box. Instead of being limited to text, you can also use a icon for an image. That's pretty cool.

LW: Any last words?

CLP: Designers, you're out there, come and contribute to Open Source.