wiki:org/teams/UxTeam

  1. UX team
    1. Introduction
    2. People
    3. UX references
  2. Documentation
    1. Tickets
    2. Misc

UX team

Welcome to the UX team page! ٩(◕‿◕)۶

[ ​UX mailing list ] [ ​irc channel: #torproject]

We generally meet on Wednesdays at 1600 UTC.

Introduction

We're on a mission to make Tor more accessible, easier to use, and gorgeously designed.

User Experience (UX) is an intersection of many disciplines and non-standardly defined. This is because the field is new, and also because the term describes both the professional practice (interaction design, visual design, or user research), but also the resulting outcome ("easy to use," "pain in the butt").

There are many, many sub-disciplines that make up UX, and even more job titles (they aren't standardized yet). But ultimately, these roles fall into one of just a few categories:

  • Interaction design: designing the structure and detailed interactions of an application of a product, deciding screens, interactions, workflows, information structure, and controlled and uncontrolled data.
  • Visual design: designing the visual layer of an application or product, deciding the color palette, typography, hierarchy of information, visual elements, and the layout. If an interaction designer is an architect, the visual designer is the interior designer.
  • Content strategy: crafting the message delivered to users, being careful to voice, tone, when the content is presented, and consistent messaging. A big part of this is internationalization, which involves translating literally and culturally to appropriately communicate with the audience.
  • User research: conducting research about user needs and behavior, which could be quantitative (studies to explore reasoning and behaviors) or quantitative (measuring statistics about the user). Research is performed to validate ideas, test prototypes, or brainstorm new features.

There are some professionals who choose to specialize in one of these categories. Others usually work as a UX engineer and perform a combination of these tasks.

People

Here are the people on the UX team at Tor, who choose to work as multi-disciplinary UX engineers:


Linda Lee, team lead (@linda | linda@…)

interaction design ████████
visual design █████
content strategy ██████
user research ██████████


Isabela Bagueros, project manager (@isabela | isabela@…)

interaction design ████████
visual design ██████
content strategy ██████████
user research █████

The UX team currently consists of two employees, who work with a generous team of volunteers. You're a part of the team if you contribute to the team!

UX references

If you have the skillset, but are just getting started on applying them to UX work, we recommend checking out Nielsen Norman's group's articles, which are all about a ~7 min read, but very informative. Starting out with their introduction to usability article, and then read their most popular articles. We've listed the introduction article and a couple selected popular articles below:

Our favorite resource is Usability book of knowledge, which has professional, detailed information. Not only is the breadth cover the comprehensive list of methods to use for UX work, but the articles are very detailed. Each page has related links to publications, a detailed description of what the method along with is advantages and disadvantages, a how-to guide with a complete procedure, stakeholders, and common pitfalls, and special considerations before using the method. For instance, look at this page on ​heuristic evaluation, and be impressed. If you want to find more pages like that, go and browse their categories:

There are also some great academic papers at select conferences for additional reading.We personally recommend starting with ​SOUPS, ​CHI, and ​PETS papers.

Documentation

Meta:

Current projects:

Past projects:

We document our work because it makes it easy to share information with various project stakeholders, funders, and project team members. We do our best to keep all of the project pages current.

Tickets

The UX team works with all teams at Tor to help them build great user experience for their projects. Since our work is always in collaboration with another team, we decided to instead of having a component for UX team (vertical way of organizing our tasks) we are adopting a keyword (tag) for our team #ux-team (horizontal way to organize our tasks) that can be used across components on Trac.

We will be labeling ongoing projects https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/UxTeam we have with this tag. But we are also building a process for you to 'tag' a ticket that you believe we should look at in order to call our attention to it. We triage tickets with #ux-team every Tuesday at 1500 UTC time on #tor-project. Where we will be looking at those and triaging what is indeed something we can help with or what is not and give you an answer of what's next.

Misc

Assets:

Notes:

Last modified 6 days ago Last modified on Jun 22, 2017, 3:30:10 PM

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