Exploration into research question to inform diary study questionaire

[Erioldoesdesign]

@Erioldoesdesign and @nimishavijay collaboratively brainstormed research questions to inform the final diary study questionaire.

Resources

https://www.designkit.org/methods/define-your-indicators
https://twitter.com/VictoryBrown_/status/1575201379643424768

Research Questions

1. What is the design process for designers in an open-source organisation?

   • How well defined is the/a design process? How was this created and iterated on?
   • What are the different phases or steps in the process?
   • Are there any methods used in each phase? What methods are used?
   • What are the resources that are used by the designer during the process?
   • How do design goals progress through time (if at all)?
   • What are the assets shared with other stakeholders?
   • Knowledge sharing: Is there any post-hoc or ad-hoc knowledge sharing? How does this happen? Who is the audience here?

2. Organisational structures and collaboration in open source design

   • What is a team? Who is in the team?
   • Who are the other people involved with designing?
   • What are the other verticals the designer is involved with?
   • Where is everyone? How do they collaborate and communicate? Tools? Time?
   • Whom does the designer interact with the most/the least?
   • Who makes the decisions? Are there any power dynamics specific to open-source orgs?

3. What are the challenges faced by designers in open source?

   • What are the different kinds of issues encountered? Communication issues, changes in scope, tricky design issues?
   • Are there any design problems the designer feels is specific to open source? What are they?
   • Whom does the designer receive the most pushback from (if at all)? Is this a pain point?
   • What are the workarounds/processes for the pain points they might experience?
   • What new resources/workarounds does the designer discover over the course of the study (if any?)

4. How open is the design process?

   • Is everything (within logical reason and ability) open to the public?
   • Does the designer interact with the public/community? How?
   • How can and do people that are not the designer contribute to ‘design’?
   • Is the designer limited by anything when trying to share design work?
   • Are the tools used by the designer open-source? How does the designer feel about the tools that are used?

5. What are Intrinsic goals of designers and how do they support themselves and each other?

   • How often (if at all) do you speak with other designers or people in the OSS team/project that are interested in design?
   • What motivates the designer to keep contributing to an OSS project(s)?
   • What makes them feel great
   • What types of design does the designer spend what % of time on and how do they feel about that? e.g. 80% UI visual design 10% communications 10% user research etc.
   • What else, outside of the OSS project's need compete's for your attention and time?

Questions/notes:

Q. How many questions/prompts in the diary study?
A. Good question! I’m hoping to go no more than 15 questions per week otherwise it’ll be more than 30mins - 1 hour of time per week to fill out the weekly study reports.
Q. How specific would the questions be?
A. a mix of specific and broad with some examples. I’m working on the survey here and just because we have a survey set doesn’t mean we can’t change and iterate if we find a question doesn’t work. As long as we notify the participants we’re adding/removing/replacing a question.