Community Meetings
#CommunityMeeting Metadecidim Community work and meeting space.
18
March
16:00 - 18:00
Reference: MDC-MEET-2021-03-1534
Version number 73 (of 73) see other versions
In autumn of this year we will start working on the redesign of the interface of Decidim. We invite the Metadecidim community to join this session, get to know the firsts drafts we’ve been working with and give your valuable feedback.
(This session will be held in English)
Central European Time
📺 Watch the video of the meeting:
Structure of the session
1. Welcome [ 16:00 - 16:10]
2. Presentation of proposals [ 16:10 - 16:30]
Explanation of the design proposals: context, needs covered and details of the layout.
3. Group work [ 16:30 - 17:15]
Discussions in groups of 5 people and voting on the most relevant conclusions
4. Conclusions [ 17:15 - 18:00]
Presentation of the conclusions of each working group and feedback from Product and Design
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34 comments
Conversation with álvaro ortiz
Would it make sense to share the proposals prior to the meeting?
Yes please ! Especially if we have 3 min to contribute each :)
It would be great to meet you guys for the first time.
Conversation with Hal Seki
Hello, I'm using Decidim in Japan and interested in this event. Can I join this meeting?
Also, is the timezone in CET?
yes
Conversation with Jason Diceman
I see already no spaces available :-(
First come first serve is not fair for people in different time zones. Also not quite a rational way to prioritize participant selection.
Capping at only 25 spaces seems to be forced by the linear design of the meeting agenda as 3 minutes per speaker to make comment (and no discussion?). Consider parallel processing agenda using breakout rooms and tools like GroupMap.com
E.g.
Before meeting: Send designs to participants (with rational). Invite questions of clarification via online forum.
In Meeting:
1. Short presentation on the designs and answer common questions.
2. Breakout rooms (~5 ppl) to discuss perspectives.
3. Brainstorm feedback comments.
4. Idea rating on comments.
5. Design leads respond to top comments.
I've done this process many times and it easily scales up to large numbers of participants.
(text comments is also more equitable for non-English speakers).
I'd be willing to help coach an online facilitator of the meeting.
wow, i think that this a great idea and could improve a lot this meeting!
I agree with @furilo and @diceman.
I think it is necessary to share the designs before the meeting. Moreover, this is a platform for participation and we can use it to make the process broader in which more than 25 people can participate. Besides, changing Decidim's interface is not a minor change.
Conversation with Oliver Azevedo Barnes
Building on top of what @furilo, @diceman and @Ariadna_VA said, couldn't the drafts be posted on Metadecidim as proposals first, to gather some async feedback with plenty of time to spare, and then have the meeting for a more informed real-time interaction?
Maybe even create a separate participatory process for the redesign, or perhaps one for Design in general.
If there's a concern regarding the presentation, maybe a video prez or a screencast could be added to the proposals, as well.
I agree. It makes a lot of sense to use Decidim to demonstrate participatory democracy on the future design of Decidim.
As the old saying goes, we need to "eat our own dog food"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
Thanks :)
To be fair, Metadecidim is already dogfeeding with regards to features (and some bugs and even some governance issues). But there's a recently established new governance structure in place, the Decidim Association, and things are in a flux. They just got funding and are working on expanding the team, on top of handling the roadmap.
I'm guessing they might be worried about having enough capacity to handle even more community communication beyond current Metadecidim and Github load (we've also been lobbying for a semi-sync comms channel).
Conversation with Carol Romero
Hey everyone! Wow, it's great to see so much interest from the community now that we are getting back to the meetings! 🚀🚀 Thank you so much for all the feedback and ideas to improve the session.
Let us go through the different issues that have been raised:
* About pre-sharing the designs, we really think it's better to do it on the day of the meeting. It is important to present not only the prototypes, but also to explain well the problems to be solved. Presenting the designs without context does not help to understand the reasons for the decisions. But don't worry, the designs will be available after the session and people who cannot attend the session will also be able to leave their feedback.
* It is also important to emphasize that this is not a closed proposal. The goal of this meeting is to open the conversation with the community about a process that will start in a few months, and we will have plenty of time to discuss in depth about different aspects of the design of the platform.
* But it is true that the dynamics initially proposed limits the number of participants and the capacity to debate and share ideas. So we take Jason's proposal to structure the meeting, thanks for the suggestion! We'll have more time to comment on the mockups and do it with more participants.
As we don't have a big facilitation team, we propose to make it self-organized, at the beginning of the session we designate a room facilitator who will be in charge of collecting feedback from her group. Check out the updated meeting agenda!
Conversation with John Willson
Will the meeting be recorded and/or will it allow observers?
Since there are no more spaces available, I support the idea to allow observers.
Hi, there are 2 seats available now
Hi, the session will be recorded and uploaded in the following days. We've also remind you that there is a waiting list that you may register. Thanks!
https://meta.decidim.org/assemblies/eix-comunitat/f/1506/
Conversation with Pierre Mesure
Hi @angela, I haven't received the link to the meeting.
Yo estoy igual (aunque me he podido inscribir hace poco). ¿Cómo podemos conectarnos?
Me neither...
Seems like I'm not the only one. I registered on the first day and I never got an invite.
@carol You might be able to help us?
I also haven't received the link.
Neither did I...
I also registered early, have been receiveing all the comments but have not received the link to join the meeting!
Can someone post it here please or contact directly?
thanks
Jason
Thanks a lot for the meeting report!
I would have loved to be able to attend, I'm looking forward to the next one!
Have a good week everyone :)
Conversation with Antti Hukkanen
Thank you a lot for the team and the participants for sharing all this! This is a great start for a better tomorrow.
I wanted to say it's great that the community is getting involved at this stage of the process. And I also wanted to mention this is a great way to show that the community's opinion matters more and more moving forward (at least the feeling I got from this)!
I agree with many of the points that were raised by the groups and it raised a some thoughts in my head too that I wanted to share below. Largely pointing out what I personally found important from the discussion. And sorry for the long text / spamming this thread, I unfortunately missed the available slots for this first meeting.
**General**
What was mentioned by @maite_lopez_sanchez (group 4) in the video's chatbox towards the end of the meeting is an excellent point. Get actual users involved in the design process very early on. I think it would be extremely valuable to have a better understanding what the real users want before starting to build a HTML prototype. Drawing should be enough, no code required at early stages.
For the design process in general, I would suggest to think of actual use cases where the users would use the platform. Not to think too much about "how could we restructure this view". I understand the challenges keeping the backwards compatibility with the design but I also think it is just a technical challenge that can be solved later on. Put users (= real people) first. Right now it seems that the assumption is that the user paths have been defined correctly to begin with but structure of information needs to change (I don't know if that is the case?).
What I would suggest to do as an exercise (if there are any resources to do this):
1. Define few of the most common use cases, just few to begin with
2. Draw very simple sketches about them (do not put much time on the design, these can be very simple)
3. Ask the users to try it out (put the images together as a clickable prototype)
4. Follow what they are trying to do, where they struggle and ask A LOT of questions in every step (why did you do that, why did you decide to press that, where did you expect to find that [if they struggle], etc.)
**Navigation**
As mentioned by @FrancescoT (group 3) it would be great if the admins could decide how they lay out the navigational structure. From our perspective, the process landing page has been unnecessary most of the times. I think it would be better as a component that can be added to the space rather than something that is forced.
I agree what was mentioned by many that adding an extra tab in the process menu does not seem a good solution to solve the "too much information" problem. I would rather think what is absolutely necessary and what is not. Could the extra info be moved to the content pages and link there if someone is interested?
Also what was mentioned by @pierre (group 4) and @verarojman (?) (group 5) about having the clear CTA button in the process header is very important element to have to guide the users to the right place at the right time.
For the mobile process navigation the feedback we've got is that many users appreciate that all the links are visible straight away. So, I feel the suggested approach for mobile process navigation would be a step backwards. Many people don't find where to go on mobile when they come to the process navigation bar.
**Buttons**
I also feel the issue with button consistency was not addressed but it is great to see it has been identified as a point for improvement.
Possibly the work just hasn't begun yet here regarding this.
**Cards**
I agree with points raised by @pierre and @virgile_deville that having a CTA in the card would be important, even when the whole card is clickable.
Having an "icon" for the cards as mentioned by @verarojman (?) (group 5) is also a great point. Helsinki had a similar requirement and we solved it by making it possible to add images for the categories. This way e.g. the proposal cards can use the category image as a fallback when the user has not defined the image.
**Content on Images**
I think this issue has been identified correctly although it was not largely discussed. Possibly the lack of dicussion on this topic might be an indicator the participants agreed with the decisions being made there or possibly it's not a large concern in general.
My opinion is that I really liked the process heading clearly separated from the image but as mentioned above, it concerns that the CTA is moved away from the header. I think it would be important to have the CTA in the header.
**Mobile UI**
Great to hear that the PWA work is in the roadmap!
For the mobile web UI, I would also support the point from @virgile_deville that hiding some of the information for mobile would be welcomed.
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