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[Horizon] UX Discussions - proposal for better organization, rising activity and awareness

 

Hello Everybody!

my name is Jarda (shortening from Jaromir) and I'm working on Horizon in a way of improvement the UX. Couple of weeks ago, there was set up community on Google+ to group UX related people to discuss designing issues. I think it was really great idea to start this effort and I love to see all people interested in helping Horizon being a better place. However, Google+ posts and discussions don't work very well for broader discussions about design issues, and I'd like to state here few examples of why I think so: - Comments are very narrow (worse readability, long comments are really bad supported).
- Comments don't include images support.
- There is no way where to store supportive materials.
- Nobody knows what issues are resolved, what are still active.
- No possibility to search for related topic (was this already discussed? Am I the first one to ask this?). - Notifications are also not from the best ones (activity of members just slipped down); not big awareness.

... and I have little bit more troubles with using it for design discussions. But long story short - I'd like to propose using GitHub for storing documentation and starting discussions related to UX of OpenStack (Horizon).

In my opinion the best way to deal with UX in Horizon is to create a GitHub repository "user_experience" within OpenStack account, store related documentation in there and use GitHub Issues for discussions. Here are some benefits: * You can get subscribed to the repositoryor even just issue you are interested in, so you get notifications on your mail or just online (whatever works for you). * Issues are grouping topics very well together so the discussion for the topic stays at one place and everything is connected.
* Once the issue is solved we can close it (and it is archived).
* Issues have quite good options for text formatting.
* You can past image directly to the post.
* You can upload bigger temporary supportive materials to your forked repository. * The upstream repository itself can work as a good place to store UX documentations for Horizon (wireframes, documents, guides, etc). * What goes to the repository itself goes through pull-request process so we can make sure that there are ideas which were publicly discussed and accepted.

Also, it provides better accessible way for any contributor, who is having some UX related issue. Since "user_experience" repository would be placed among other projects, it will be very easy to notice it and find this place if I need such a help. So, it is more likely, that we will increase activity and get more ideas together, also we enhance connecting developers and design people together, if both are contributing. I see UX as another project under OpenStack, though - sure - little bit different type of project, but still a project. And if we manage to get this project active we will definitely enhance resulting UX of Horizon, which is a goal.

What do you think about this idea? Any thoughts? I'd be very happy to help with setting this up so it works smoothly.

Best
-- Jarda
jcoufal at #openstack-horizon

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