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Exploratory Research for the Fedora Project (2023)

Client: Fedora Project

Role: Lead user researcher

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Methods: Competitive analysis, remote contextual interviews, design thinking session, affinity mapping, brainstorming

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Tools: Spreadsheets, Miro, whiteboards

Timeline: October 2016-January 2017

Executive Summary
Context
Fedora Hubs was developed to support the Fedora community in working together more easily, bringing new contributors onboard, and reducing information coming from Fedora to that which is relevant for an individual or team.

Fedora Regional Hubs was an addition to this project around supporting the community aspect of the Fedora Project. Specifically, to connect community members with each other socially and around planning and creating events to introduce the general public to Fedora.
affinity.png

Miro board after affinity mapping of problems identified through interviews

Prioititization of categories identified through affinity mapping

Findings and outcomes
Existing methods to plan events and find other fedora members had six major categories of problems with the existing tools:
  • Finding, sharing, and scaling resources local to an individual or group
  • Knowing how much money was available for events or activities
  • Onboarding of new members
  • Localization difficulties
  • Learning from past events
  • No event planning tools available

For reasons of the number of people affected, the severity of impact, and the ability to gather enough information to be effective, we choose to focus on helping Fedorans find local resources including other contributors, relevant events, and groups.
 
From this, we concluded that our overarching goal was to have people looking for local Fedora information use Fedora Hubs by default. To support this, we decided that we needed filterable, sortable master lists for regional hubs, events, and Fedora people. We then discussed possible constraints and needs for the master list interfaces.
Adding interpersonal interaction to an online tool

The Fedora Project is the free, community upstream for RedHat Linux for which most of the people working on the operating system are volunteers. These volunteers, also known as community members and - when they are contributing their time and energy toward the Fedora Project - contributors, are physically scattered around the world but conceptually linked together into teams based on whatever aspect of Fedora Project they are contributing to.

Due to this combination of being widely scattered while working together on various aspects of the operating system, they often struggle to make and maintain connections with their fellow contributors and to successfully work together while maintaining an appropriate awareness of the status of their work.

The Fedora Team had previously decided to create a tool to support the team aspects of the contributors, and I was brought on board to add support around the globally scattered aspect of being part of the Fedora Project. Specifically, I was tasked with helping Fedora members more easily and smoothly create and maintain the vital interpersonal connections that would increase the chances of a new contributor staying a part of the community in the long term.

To identify the best place to focus our efforts, I began with a competitive analysis, performed contextual interviews with those most involved with the interpersonal aspect of the Fedora Project, took part in a design thinking session, and identified the area for design focus based on affinity mapping and prioritization.

How do others handle interpersonal interaction in online tools?
Competitive analysis provided important context and helped develop questions to keep in mind throughout the rest of the project:
 
  • how do we balance privacy while allowing new Fedora members to easily get involved?
  • what do we want people to be able to do easily, and what do we want to restrict?
  • what will we support for searching?
  • should we let people suggest events?
 
For additional information, see this summary document.

Snippet of the competitive analysis spreadsheet

Understanding the existing experience and surrounding context

I interviewed 7 Fedora members to understand their existing experience with Fedora event planning and attendance. I then identified problems and patterns to bring to my mentor and the Fedora project lead to better understand the context around those experiences before the affinity mapping and brainstorming session.

Categorize problems and prioritize those categories
My mentor and I categorized the identified problems through affinity mapping, prioritize those categories, and brainstorm on possible solutions. The highest priority category for which we had enough information to proceed was that of helping Fedorans find local resources such as other contributors, relevant events, and groups.
affinity.png

Miro board after affinity mapping of problems identified through interviews

Prioititization of categories identified through affinity mapping

Outcomes

The proposed focus category provided me with the context with which to approach brainstorming possible solutions, creating low-fidelity mockups, presenting those possibilities to developers to explore their feasibility, and do usability testing on those mockups.

As a result of this work, we were able to identify areas for future work and more clearly define areas [brain melted done now].

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