Activity report 2023–2025

Here's a report of what has been done since the beginning of this working group in autumn 2023.

Activities

• Monthly community calls were organized

• A full design system for 0.28+ was published

• Resources have been centralized

• A list of projects & tasks has been organized

Furthermore, calls were organized with the product team (Carol, Jupa, Andres) to explore how this group can best help and collaborate, a few UX bugs were fixed, a proposal made to improve email digests, and potential contributor communities were identified. Penpot has also been audited for a potential switch in the future. The navigation structure of documentation pages has been standardized to improve discoverability.

Takeaways

• Monthly community calls

  • They serve as an entry point to many members of the community who enquire about design issues.

  • UX Designers are quite absent of this community (aside from @julieta_pasetti_2 and @roband). Most participants are fellow devs, information architects, product managers or platform admins.

  • An unsuccessful (but heroic) gesture was made to set up grounds for self-organization.

• 0.28+ design system

  • It was instrumental to the product team's work

  • An updated version is unfortunately still lacking for the community to use

• Ressources, projects and tasks

  • Ressources are unclear if used

  • Projects and tasks were several times a bit too buggy to use in the current version

• Many design concerns, but no process to find solutions

  • Most participants come to the calls with design concerns, however there often isn't any solution to solve them. The barrier for contribution is too high.

    • Example: surveys have been identified as a priority topic to improve the UX, however, redesign the UX of surveys is an important task. Even if the resources could be identified to produce such designs (the task would take a few days), the resources for dev integration are not guaranteed by any means. It therefore seems that the golden path for UX contributions would be to have an available designer and an available dev with much free time on their hands, which never happens.

  • Possible paths forward:

    • Product team could ask this design working group to produce userflows or wireframes on focused topics which are not an urgent priority. This exploratory work could help the product team focus on managing the deliverables.

    • Product team could ask for UX feedbacks on upcoming designs. This has already been tried a few times, but it is unclear if it resulted in a lighter workload for them (probably not).

    • UX & Dev contributors can sync to deliver small improvements (such as this). These granular contributions are easier to handle, however they miss the sweetest spot: focusing on larger design patterns issues solves many problems downstream, whereas there will always be many small improvements to make.

What's next?

• UX writing: Locales on Crowdin have been identified as a low-hanging fruit to improve Decidim's UX, without the need for a new collaboration process with the product team. For example, admin helper texts could include hyperlinks to the concerned documentation pages. This would improve the admin UX and would be mutually beneficial to gather more external contributions to improve the documentation

• Improve the UX of docs.decidim.org: templates to update screenshots can be shared.

• Establish best practices to editorialize content as an admin. Many admins lack guidance to handle image sizes, text lengths, content tone, and mobile navigation.

• Establish a clear UX contribution process without waiting on the product team: such as for locales, documentation, or configuration best practices as an admin. Once this is established, fellow communities can be invited in to contribute.

• Keep communicating with the product team, and offering help in order to move towards an updated design system ready for the community to use.

• ...and keep doing these calls!