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Nina Eleanor Alter edited this page Jan 9, 2022 · 141 revisions

Once more, but with feeling: Please never post information about specific SecureDrop users (Sources, Journalists, or Admins) to this public wiki.

Table of Contents

Prototypes Archive

  • Wiki Page of noteworthy prototypes created to demonstrate functional ideas for the Source UI, SecureDrop Workstation, or Journalist Web UI, or for user testing.

Design Principles

What are we trying to achieve in design solutions? Are there shared experiential values among the team we all agree we'd like to see reflected in our built environments? Below is our approach, to date. Don't agree with something, or want to add something? That's part of the process, bring it up in a forthcoming meeting! Nina's presentation on design principles has resources that can help inform how to put these to work. "It's not personal, it's a team design principle!"

1. Design for users Whistleblowers are a wide and varied group of humans. Journalists, NGO workers, server admins, and business folks interested in bringing SecureDrop to their organizations, are among the many types of humans that use SecureDrop on the newsroom side of things. Check in with the Who Are Our Users? page early and often!

2. Guide behavior to inform safe choices Behavior. What the user can grok in the moment and connect to behavioral actions. Knowledge-informing text is for articles, not in-app text. Cognition » behavior, not learning » memory. Martin should be an especially good person to guide this, having done user research.

3. Seek to contain chaos/confusion in visual & written language choices. Reduce cognitive friction, cultivate calm. Written language(s), visual language, semiotics; the complete experience journey. Especially challenging when expected Javascript elements being absent, can… well, create confusion.

4. Clear, human, humble, neutral Aesthetics should be visually appealing and easy to consume, without calling attention to the artifacts themselves. SD is the messenger, not the message.

5. ACAB "Policing" approaches to opsec guidance come from the best of intentions, yet carry as many not-obvious drawbacks as policing in civil society does. Unfortunately, wishy-wash wrapped in too many words, is often employed as its alternative. There is a middle ground—and we need to strive towards finding that. It is hard, but The Force is strong with this one. Reading: Abolish the Design Police Inside Your Head

Contributors

Open, community-based software projects developing tools for humans real needs, need user-centered research and design. Compelled to contribute? Read-on, and please do!

  • Please review our Code of Conduct should you choose to contribute.
  • Drop on into the SecureDrop channel in Gitter to introduce yourself & read about current happenings.
    • Note: As there's only one regular UX contributor atm, Gitter is mostly developer babble... but that one contributor (also the author of this wiki) always loves other friendlies dropping in to say hi! :)
  • In the past online discussions have taken place in the SecureDrop forums.
  • Many occasional SecureDrop ux contributors are also active in the Open Source Design forums.

UX Meetings

Public meetings are scheduled bi-weekly. You don’t need to be "a member" of the UX team to participate. Just show-up and introduce yourself! RSVP's are appreciated, and meeting agendas typically come together on the meeting wiki page, ad-hoc, the day before.

SecureDrop Users

We design for users that need security and anonymity—and while the security part of that is essential, our users are still human! Learn about who those humans are on our Users page.

Team Resources

Best practice guides for user-centric decisions and activities for design/research practitioners and non-practicioners, alike!

Frontend Dev

  • WebAim Accessibility tool
  • Bi-directionality in Localization best practices via the fine folks on the material.io team!
  • Patternfly library
    • Sweet resource with great functional examples (and code, and annotated mockups!) of various app and webpage components.
    • No bandwidth to get a designer on it? Find a pattern complete with code, here!
    • Note: these patterns appear to be both open-source and tested, so I would not recommend changing them—unless there is a concrete or functional reason why.

Experience Design (UxD)

User Research (UxR)

Applied research to learn about users, and ethnographic or product discovery research to inform what to make and how to make stuff work well for humans.

General Interest

  • IxDA Portland's Goodreads
    • Recommended books on various UX topics
    • Curated by Nina & other PDX UX peeps
    • Integrated with Amazon; pls learn about the books on Goodreads or Amazon, but make any purchases from a local used bookstore or from Powells. :)
  • Methodologies + Values

SecureDrop UX Resources

  • TorProject's UX team page
    • TorProject icons New icons we may need to incorporate into SD ux or documentation, hopefully live here.
      • Many of the icons on this page, and everywhere else I've been able to find in +1hr of websurfing, are out of date. They are typically tweaked for sharpness and clarity in display, when moved into production—or, as is the case with Antonella's "New Onion," they're outright absent from here.
  • New Study template page
    • Includes outgoing links to current/past study research plans, discussion guides, and other artifacts
  • Screenshots from the current (Sep 2018) Journalist and Source UIs
  • A smattering of other pages that discuss combined design/research efforts from past Journalist Interface (web) ux work
  • In-progress Personas work for Source and Journalist users (journalist linked artifacts tbd)
  • Newsroom profiles and journey maps documenting SecureDrop workflows linked artifacts tbd
  • Redaction Guide
    • Taking notes of a user working with the product, of a user interview, or a straight transcript of either? Awesome!
    • Out of respect for research participants it is a UX industry standard to always redact notes and/or transcripts, before sharing with a broader team. For SecureDrop, the need to protect participant and contributor safety is clearly more urgent.
    • Please NEVER share notes or transcripts from a research session, before fully redacting.
      • If using GitHub Wiki, GDocs, or any tool that preserves document history, please be mindful to cut-and-paste redacted text into a new document, and to ONLY share that document.

User Research Work

As a project brought to life by a community of generous volunteers, publicly available and easy to consume evidence of user needs as uncovered through human-centered research, is vital.

Have a particular thing in mind you feel could benefit from some UxR love? Great! Please check out our open backlog issues to see if it may fit into one, create a new issue, or attend one of our Thursday (public!) meetings to informally present your idea.

Call For Global Facilitators

We welcome one and all to contribute in helping us learn more about the needs of journalists, whistle-blowers, IT folks managing or installing SecureDrop instances, and how SecureDrop impacts the work of each. We especially need research facilitation help in countries outside the United States and Western Europe, fluent in both English and the local languages. Countries in the Middle East, Russia, Asia, Africa, and South America, are of especially high importance to secure volunteer resources in.

Interested? Please add yourself to our list of UX community volunteers—and specify your interest in research facilitation. Location and language skills are the only things we are unprepared to offer guidance in—everything else, is cake. :)

Experience Design Projects

Design on today's SecureDrop Source web interface and Journalist web interface are ongoing. We encourage new folks interested in contributing to this work to browse the SecureDrop Issues flagged as UX. Broader efforts outside of the above, are captured in our User Experience Design issues. Below are pages for larger efforts happening:

Who Uses SecureDrop?
Learn about SecureDrop's users!

Design

Contributors

Learn!

User Research

Et cetera

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