Triangulating findings with existing issues and priorities to propose solutions
Since there are many user flows in OpenRefine, I think it would make the most sense to focus on one specific area to start (e.g. install, project setup, facets, etc) and move on from there.
I'd be curious to hear from community members if this project idea resonates and hear suggestions for initial areas of focus!
For context: I'm a UX designer and have worked on a couple open-source projects in the past few years. I'm relatively new to OpenRefine, so I'm coming in with fresh eyes.
There's 100's of areas actually. And each one needs love more than ever. We've had discussions on various improvement areas and you've likely seen the other posts in the Development & Design and posts tagged with design-chat.
Honestly, this kind of topic is best done in a collaborative meeting(s) so I'd suggest to coordinate a scheduled collaborative meeting with interested parties.
We often use https://meet.jit.si
As far as picking a time or scheduling a meeting, I created a new event for this to narrow down a date and time the community could agree on and where I've marked my availability over the next month or so OpenRefine UX Audit - When2meet
Over the past few months, we have conducted extensive community outreach and documented user feedback. I have listed two potential projects below and included links to some of the most recent results from community feedback.
As Thad mentioned, depending on your interest and time availability, there could be hundreds of areas to work on. Reviewing those reports may help you identify interesting topics to work on. Let us know what picked your interest.
1. Ease new user onboarding
We are aware that OpenRefine has a steep learning curve. How can we make it more accessible? This was in the top request of our last two large outreach:
At our recent Barcamp, we discussed working with GIS data. Analyzing how OpenRefine interacts with GIS data can help guide our future support for this data type.
@Martin I looked into the reports you linked - very helpful! I think focusing on ease of new user onboarding is a good place for me to start, especially given my level of familiarity with the tool. I can cover installation, in-app initial onboarding, and online documentation in the analysis.
@thadguidry A community meeting on the topic sounds great! I input my availability on the when2meet. Looking forward to discussing with whoever would like to join
@thadguidry Looks like just the two of us have input availability in the When2meet! Based on our input, I'd suggest a meeting this Friday, 16 August, at 11am CEST to chat about the UX audit.
Had a great call with @asengupta ! I was very impressed with her background in UX and fostering better user interactions. I really liked her approach where she began to document and show areas of user interaction categories which will eventually map into OpenRefine feature areas. I told her that I really liked the decoupled approach and her mindset and encouraged her to continue the research and eventually have more meetings with the community and groups of users. In addition, I encouraged her to coordinate with @lozanaross and others on overlapping concerns of the UI/UX.
She has a deep background in these areas and has supported KDE among other projects and was initially introduced to us from @antonin_d where they met at FOSDEM.
Let's support her continued research and design considerations with the community as things progress.
Thank you for the kind introduction and guidance @thadguidry! I'm looking forward to continuing the research, getting to know more of the community, and contributing to the project
I wanted to share my first steps on this project. I started an analysis of the installation flow, since it's the first flow users go through and small enough to get a sense of whether this type of analysis is a good approach before moving forward to more complex flows.
My work can be found in this file: OpenRefine Heuristic Analysis. It has two screens; more can be added if/when we continue the analysis on different flows:
Heuristics Matrix Template: the starting point for the analysis. It's organized by heuristic (rows) and issue severity (columns).
Heuristics Matrix: Installation: my analysis for the installation flow. One sticky per issue, color-coded by location (e.g. website, documentation, operating system, application), grouped by severity. I've also included possible solutions, which I'd love to discuss with the community, and linked open GitHub issues where I could find them.
A quick summary of the findings: the biggest issue I found was the need to circumvent security warnings to open the app, which I know is a known issue. This could be improved by fixing developer certificates or, barring that, improving guidance on security circumvention on the website and in the documentation. I also found a handful of ways the installation guidance on the website and in the documentation could be improved. Full details are on the stickies.
I think it'd be great to discuss the findings on a call with whoever is interested, then make GitHub issues based on community consensus. Here's a when2meet for scheduling: OpenRefine UX Audit: Installation Flow - When2meet
Tangentially, for my own clarity, I documented the installation flow I followed here: OpenRefine User Flows: Installation Flow (Mac). After I mentioned this to @Martin, we talked about how flow documentation itself might be a worthwhile project, as it could support UX and development workflows and, possibly, be used as a resource for end users. It would be interesting to hear others' thoughts on this!
This is fantastic work! Thank you so much!
I think by choosing to investigate the install process you made a great pick. It's something we often forget the importance of.
Your findings are a great reminder of the urgency of signing apps. A few days ago I have reminded CS&S of the current issue with Apple signing. We have never signed the Windows distribution so far but we're likely not very far from that, we'd mostly need to buy a certificate.
Your suggestions to improve the "Thank you" page are also really great - you're right that it feels like a great opportunity to give missing info. I hadn't thought of using this page for that!
