Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

dachary · February 5, 2018, 7:25am

While visiting booth at FOSDEM this week-end I discovered Open Source Design and it has been around for a few years. They kindly offered a 15 minute Design Clinic consultancy and the outcome was two suggestions:

It is usually expected that the oldest reply is on top but it is the other way around in the source interface when we display the journalist replies.
it would maybe look better if the journalist replies were in one column and the upload + message box in another column, next to each other (after discussing this with @conorsch, he remembered related improvements suggested improvements from last year that are also related to how messages display could be improved.

Unfortunately, I did not realize until today that a devroom dedicated to design was also organized by Open Source Design and completely missed the opportunity to visit, learn and chat.

It looks like we could post a gratis job and see if people are interested to help SecureDrop.

What do you think ?

saptaks · February 5, 2018, 7:48am

I totally agree with the suggestion for “the oldest reply on top”. I will check out the code and see if I can implement it. As of the other point, I will check out the journalist interface. I think it should be a small sass change to get it on the same row in two different columns.

conorsch · February 5, 2018, 4:25pm

I’m pleased people are discussing this, because the “oldest reply on top” sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. The fact that many UX professionals we’ve spoken to strongly disagree shows how badly we are in need of UX input!

saptaks · February 5, 2018, 7:37pm

@conorsch I think there are scenarios for both the cases. So like in GitHub where showing just the last reply leaves not much context it usually follows “oldest reply on top”. Reddit also follows a similar approach because of the context thing. But in social media and elsewhere where often a single reply can itself be treated independent of the other replies, the “most recent on top” is followed. So based on the use case both makes sense. In securedrop, I feel context plays an important role because of which I feel “oldest reply on top” makes more sense.