After following this project for about a year now, I’m in some ways quite disappointed with how this has turned out. There has been good stuff as well, but from my point of view, which is UX, the project is lacking focus big time. Against my better judgement I’ll try to explain, again:
1. There is no documentation on design
When I first looked at the design I saw a lot of things that could be improved and some questionable design choices. I tried to find out where those came from and found nothing. There is no documentation on the design at all. You can try to follow some old forum discussions but thats 99% arbitrary small design changes made on a whim and 1% weird analogies (“this is like walking into a room”). How could I contribute, when I don’t know the original problems the designers tried to solve? I don’t know how they ended up with this compromise or what was considered. What were the decisions based on?
2. Complaint driven design is only for the official developers
What about the complaint driven process, you ask? Well, I haven’t seen the complaints. I have only seen how they were interpreted. There is no database on complaints that i could take a look at. Where I could see what complaints lead to what design decisions, what are the current open issues and what has been ignored. Are my complaints being recorded somewhere?
3. There is no way to officially challenge the design
Now, I could try to come up with other solutions on my own. Take I guess about why things are the way they are. I could gather my own research and try to come up with suggestions. But the problem then becomes, there is no process to evaluate my work. I can’t be sure that it’s even considered. The way decisions seem to be made, there is a big chance that it just gets ignored or misunderstood. Without documentation on the current solution, its impossible to challenge it. And worse, you always have to start from scratch.
I could continue. I just don’t believe it will make a difference. Good design is not something you just come up with. It’s not rocket science either. It’s 90% basic ground work. Research, problem framing and solving. And that 90% of the work is either skipped or not communicated to us. @codinhorror thinks this is how every piece of software in the world is and is supposed to be. I say you need a designer in the team.