Fedora Hubs Research and Analysis
In this part of the Regional Fedora Hubs project, I gathered information about the context within which I would be working.
I first needed to understand the background for Fedora Hubs itself, the constraints, and the requirements. At the same time, I explored the space of our competitors.
With the information gathered from this research, I interviewed potential users, and analyzed the results with the lead designer for Fedora and the Fedora Project Lead.
Competitive Analysis
Findings
Basic usability problems throughout all of the sites.
Useful search tools are difficult to create, and this dramatically affects the experience.
I identified the major purpose of each site in terms of how easy various tasks were to complete.
In addition, I had a number of questions after the analysis:
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how do we balance privacy while allowing new Fedora members to easily get involved?
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what do we want people to be able to do easily, and what do we want to restrict?
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what will we support for searching?
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should we let people suggest events?
This summary document includes the full spreadsheet used to organize my findings during the analysis, as well as more details on my findings.
Contextual Interviews
Preparation for contextual interviews included identifying prospective users, identifying target topics to discuss, creating a basic script, and running a pilot test.
During the interviews, I asked interviewees about their experiences with creating Fedora events. I also asked them to walk me through the tools, processes, and artifacts that they used during their most recently planned event. For those folks with less planning experience, I instead focused on their experiences in learning about and attending Fedora events.
I did some preliminary analysis of the interviews to identify possible problems and interesting trends, and then collected the overall information into patterns and workflows and individual top pains documents.
Interview Analysis
Design Thinking Session
I met with Máirín Duffy (Mo) - the principal interaction designer for Fedora - and Matt Miller - the Fedora Project lead, and one of the main clients for Fedora Hubs for a design thinking session.
During this session, we looked specifically at
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The lack of support for event funding management and tracking
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The difficulty in finding people nearby
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Better integration, support, and publicity to help bring new folks into Fedora
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How to best location support into Fedora Hubs, and how to handle privacy concerns around it.
Affinity Mapping and Brainstorming
Mo and I used affinity mapping to categorize the problems identified in the design thinking session and the interviews, then did a deep dive brainstorming session on the two highest priority categories.
During the brainstorming session, we decided to focus on helping Fedorans find local resources - 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.
For more details on this section, see my affinity mapping and brainstorming post on Medium.
