Resources are often a limiting factor in these things, and not even in
places where one would normally expect, it seems like. Unfortunately
when priorities are all over the place, what can you even do?
I'm a little confused by your second paragraph, though - if not the UX
engineers, then who is getting the prototypes to the product engineers
and making sure they're properly made?
Also, thank you so much for taking the time to respond to all of this.
On 10/11/15 23:50, Sherah Smith wrote:
Yes, you are correct, we have one visual designer,
May, and she is
working on UI Standardization right now. Ideally we would have more
visual designers but you are correct about resources.
And yes, I am a UX engineer and I mainly interact with Design Research
and Design. I build mobile prototypes that we take to users for
testing before iterating/releasing them. I do not typically interact
with engineers these days as I am on the design side of things. :)
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com
<mailto:zhorishna@gmail.com>> wrote:
According to the Staff and Contractors page, May is a 'Visual
Experience Designer', which sounds like exactly what you're
describing when it comes to the overlap between interaction and
visual design. Is it just that you lack the visual design
resources currently (one visual designer who isn't even just
visual design does seem a bit insufficient for such a huge task!)
to not overlap your roles?
Also, very cool to see how the roles interact laid out like this.
You're a UX engineer too, right? Does this mean you're often one
of the ones interacting with other engineers/developers?
Sorry if I'm getting a bit off track here - design has always been
one of the more opaque areas of the Foundation, at least from a
volunteer perspective, and it's really nice to get a view of
what's going on in such an integral part of the organisation.
On 10/11/15 22:50, Sherah Smith wrote:
>Why do
you make the distinction that UX designers also do visual when you stated
already that you also have specifically visual designers?
Because interaction design and visual design are separate things.
Visual designers are hired to design visual components, while UX
designers are hired to design user experiences. Sometimes
building experiences involves visual design, but not always - for
example, in cases where we are innovating new ideas that do not
yet have standards.
>Are the visual designers the ones doing the UI
standardisation?
May, who is a Visual Designer, is indeed working on UI
Standardization, along with Volker, who is a UX Engineer.
>How does Design Research relate to the rest of
this?
Roughly:
Design Researchers conduct user research ---> UX Engineers build
interactive prototypes working with Design Research and Designers
---> Designers polish and iterate the prototypes with the
prototypers ---> Engineers build the designs
As for the difference between UX Designer and UX Engineer, the
main difference is that the UX Engineer has an engineering
background and applies that to the building (coding) of
interactive prototypes.
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com
<mailto:zhorishna@gmail.com>> wrote:
Er, forgot to cc the main list, since I did cross-post in the
first place.
Sorry about that!
On 10/11/15 22:25, Isarra Yos wrote:
Hi, thank you for your response. This
does clarify a lot.
Why do you make the distinction that UX designers also do
visual when you stated already that you also have
specifically visual designers? Are the visual designers the
ones doing the UI standardisation?
How does Design Research relate to the rest of this? You
state that they are not designers, but their work is an
integral part of the user experience design process.
Also, in the future, could you please use a darker colour
(or even just leave it as the default) for your emails? That
grey is really hard to read and I misread a few things the
first time that made it look a little... different from what
you obviously meant.
Thanks!
On 10/11/15 22:04, Sherah Smith wrote:
Hi Isarra,
>> what is the 'design team'?
Even though the design team (as it used to be) is now split
out under different managers with no centralized Director,
we still consider ourselves a "team" in that we still work
together across teams to maintain consistency and provide
feedback, collaborate, and review one another's work where
needed. We have a weekly meeting and regularly talk and
brainstorm in person across teams to support one another in
our work.
Design Research is the team that conducts research that
informs the design of products we build on all other teams.
The employees on this team are not designers.
Reading Design is a sub-team under Reading, and it designs
reading experiences, mostly for mobile platforms. Where you
see "Visual Designer" as a title, that person works on
visual designs. "UX Designer" works on combinations of
visual and user experience design, mostly the latter, and
"UX Engineer" builds interactive prototypes and interaction
design.
The reorganization that you reference happened in late
April this year and was not a decision the design team
itself made. Rather, it came from upper management. We do
now work within the teams you see listed on the staff page,
on experiences for those teams specifically. So for
example, you will not see a designer on the Search &
Discovery team working on experiences for the Editing team.
Is there a particular concern you have about this
organization that you feel like we should be discussing, or
does this answer your questions?
Thank you,
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Isarra Yos
<zhorishna(a)gmail.com <mailto:zhorishna@gmail.com>> wrote:
From time to time I see references to the 'design team'
on lists and on phabricator. But what does this really
mean now? As I understood it, the previous monolithic
Design Team was essentially disbanded toward the
beginning of the year, with the designers themselves
distributed amongst the other WMF teams in order to
more directly integrate their services into the
development workflow (which sounds like a pretty good
idea to me, at least, since design is such an integral
part of most development). Did this happen? According
to
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors,
there seem to still be two teams now with the word
'design' in their names, Reading Design and Design
Research, though these both seem to have somewhat more
specialised functions than just general design, namely
Reading (sounds like front-end non-interactive mw
stuff, the visuals perhaps?) and Research.
So what is the 'design team'? Is it one of these,
though the teams only have 5 and 4 people on them,
respectively? Is it just WMF designers in general?
As much as this is also just a plea to please be more
specific, if you have an actual answer, or if you have
been saying this, please, speak up, share your
experience and where you're coming from. As confusing
as it is, I suspect a discussion of what and why this
has been going on could also clear up quite a bit.
Thanks.
-I
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*Sherah Smith*
UX Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
206-660-6585 <tel:206-660-6585>
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--
*Sherah Smith*
UX Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
206-660-6585 <tel:206-660-6585>
sherahsmith.com <http://sherahsmith.com>
donate.wikipedia.org <http://donate.wikipedia.org>
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_______________________________________________
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Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Design@lists.wikimedia.org>
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--
*Sherah Smith*
UX Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
206-660-6585
sherahsmith.com <http://sherahsmith.com>
donate.wikipedia.org <http://donate.wikipedia.org>
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