What can we learn from more than 30 years of UX practice, to help us create digital music services that work for humans, rather than making humans work hard to get the interface to meet their needs?
UX seems to be getting a bad rap these days. It’s often perceived as either scattering eyecandy on top of whatever the coders come up with (that’s graphic design, not UX). Or worse, as being about Machiavellian designers plotting to make anti-social platforms seem useful and pleasant. Yes, some UX people might be pressganged into doing that at corporate day jobs, much to their horror. But that’s almost the opposite of what UX is really about.
Use Experience (or more traditionally “User” Experience) is just what it says on the tin; it’s about people’s whole experience of using a technology. Does it do what you need? Is it easy to tell without too much fiddling around? Is it easy to learn how to use it? Once you’ve learned, can you do it quickly and efficiently as part of your preferred workflow? Will you have to learn again every time the interface gets an update?
A few resources for learning more;
Máirín Duffy is a UX designer who’s been employed at Red Hat and active in the Fedora project. Here’s a podcast interview where she talks about the role of UX in making software freedom more accessible to non-geeks.
Here’s a FOSDEM talk by Otto Richter about doing interviews with people using Forgejo, to better understand why they’d like the software to work differently, and how to meet those needs.
Here’s a list of Free Code software that supports different aspects of UX work, all of which can be community-hosted.