How to start with design in your open source project

Design is vital to adoption, try these user experience tips to improve your project.

Most open source software (OSS) projects haven’t had much of an opportunity to think about what design means to them, the users of their software, and the developers involved in the project. As open source projects mature and gain users and contributors, the “design” becomes more and more important, regardless of whether the project has a graphical user interface (GUI) or any kind of user interface. The way that we design our experiences is vital to adoption and successful use of software of any kind.

How to know when design is needed and why design is important and useful

There’s never a bad time to start considering design in your open source project, the earlier the better is often the advice that is given by veterans of the design world. However, open source design and its processes and norms can be unusual for those more familiar with engineering and development processes and norms.

I recommend that an optimal time for design to step in and participate is both before any code has been written or after a strong maintainer group has been established in an OSS project with some clear definitions on what success means for the project and the community involved.

Once code has been written, users and contributors can gather and make changes. The introduction of design can be de-stabilizing if a governance or decision making process for how design becomes involved is poorly thought out or reactive. This does not need to be complex and can simply be some of the maintainers and core users’ written expectations, goals and a rough “roadmap” of what they want for the project. They should also include any key points of contact for specific aspects of the project, e.g. a point of contact for design of a feature/section or per process of the project, along with a point of contact for community, documentation, etc.

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Your options when starting design for OSS

One good rule is to start considering design contribution roles once there is clear divergence of how users and contributors want to use the project. By involving specifically user research proficient designers here, you can begin to understand where the diverging needs of users are and how to represent them with minimal feature bloat or user confusion.

Another potential route for including design, is if you have a GUI that is getting increasingly complex as it gets contributed to and used by users that you both expected, and didn’t expect! Here is when seeking and asking designers who specialize in user interfaces and product design can help you to first, catalog the existing interface elements and interactions and then go on to build out logical, user-informed ways of those interfaces to expand if and when needed.

There are many more routes and pathways for welcoming and nurturing designers into your open source projects but, the last way I’ll mention is a common way many open source projects start with design. By asking designers about what they’d start with in their contributions and clearly and publicly asking for “design bugs” to be submitted. Many projects either don’t think that they can benefit from design contributions or don’t think they need them (or will ever need them!) This demonstrates the narrow understanding of what design can do for human to technology interaction, commonly known as Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in some spaces.

Tips to improve designer contributions to your OSS project

When you open up your OSS project to designers to submit “bugs” or “issues” using a template that speaks both the language of software development and design improvements, then you’ll likely discover new and previously un-explored ways of how to improve the usability of your project. I recommend two small tips:

1. Making sure that “design” and “designers” (or other terms like usability, HCI, UX, etc.) are mentioned either in a specific Design Contributing documentation guidelines, the general contributing guidelines, or in the top level README document. 
   
2. And making a first version of a “design” (or UI, UX, usability) bug issue template with some key questions like:
   
   • What was the function that failed to meet your user needs? 
   • What did you expect to happen when you performed that action/function? 
   • Improving or making this better would look something like [describe here in ways like “I would be able to do X, Y, Z faster/more accurately/with better guidance etc.]

There are lots of other ways you can introduce and encourage design and designers in your OSS projects but primarily, designers are looking for any mention or indication of your open source projects interest and openness to design contributions. From that basis of mutual respect and desire for contributions, you can build out how the processes and interactions of design contributions best look for your own open source projects and communities.

How and where to reach out to designers to contribute

As a core maintainer of Open Source Design and author of this article, I would like to mention we have a “job boards” where OSS projects and individuals can post paid work on OSS projects and unpaid requests for contributions from designers. There’s a small but engaged design community on our discourse forum where you can seek advice and support for what to ask for or we also encourage the open ask for “design help” in our jobs board.

Another fountain of knowledge is the Sustainable open source design podcast where there are more than 50 episodes. We speak with those interested in and practicing design in OSS for their wisdom and experience so that others can learn.

Other options include reaching out to designers on platforms that they typically congregate on like LinkedIn, X, Behance, and Instagram or tagging a social post with a hashtag like #opensourcedesign and making sure you’re ready for the requests and replies you get!

And of course, don’t forget that designers show up at conferences for open source projects to talk about their work. There’s plenty of talks and sessions run by designers at All Things Open 2024 and you’ll find designers are regulars at conferences like FOSDEM, COSCUP and FOSS Backstage where you can ask for advice or connections to designers for your open source project.

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