Mark Boulton

One of the inter­est­ing chal­lenges of the redesign pro­cess for Drupal.org is man­aging the expect­a­tions of a com­munity of over 200,000 registered users. Not only that, but a com­munity of largely open source developers. I men­tion that spe­cific­ally because of the cul­ture that sur­rounds open source devel­op­ment. Leisa and I have been try­ing some­thing that is, frankly, ter­ri­fy­ing. We’re design­ing in the open.

When I gradu­ated from uni­ver­sity, I was asked to go before a panel of mod­er­at­ors and exam­iners three times to jus­tify my work. For best part of an hour I argued, listened, seethed and nearly cried as my work was verbally torn apart by a com­mit­tee of ‘learned’ pro­fes­sion­als. On my way out of the room, utterly dev­ast­ated by what just happened, my lec­turer in typo­graphy took me to one side and said some words I’ll never for­get: ‘Mark, a camel is a horse designed by com­mit­tee.’ ‘Take what you can, and learn. But ulti­mately, stick to your guns and believe in yourself.’

He was of course imply­ing that design by com­mit­tee never works and nearly always res­ults in a poor product. The egot­ist­ical designer in me agrees. How­ever, the more prag­matic side of me dis­agrees. Maybe design by com­mit­tee doesn’t work, but design by com­munity could.

Ask­ing the com­munity for help

Leisa has been doing a fant­astic job recently of open­ing up her pro­cess, thoughts and ideas with regards to the Drupal.org redesign. So far, we’ve had the fol­low­ing gems: 

• Drupal.org — Help Over­haul the Inform­a­tion Archi­tec­ture — par­ti­cip­ate in our online card sort!
• Drupal.org — One site or many?
• Drupal.org — come wire­frame with me!
• Out­siders and Insiders — Under­stand­ing Drupal.org users
• DRAFT: Drupal.org Exper­i­ence Strategy
• User research for Drupal.org redesign — what we’ve done, what we’re doing

By and large the com­munity has respon­ded well, offer­ing valu­able insight into some thorny issues. I thought this was some­thing I could do with some of the brand­ing work we’ve been doing.

• What’s in a Word(mark)?
• Drupal’s core brand values
• Ini­tial Word­mark design

Now, it may be the sub­ject mat­ter, or my phras­ing. Per­haps it was too early in a pro­cess. But as you can prob­ably see by the com­ments, it didn’t go so well. Actu­ally, say­ing that, I think it did go well up to the point where the com­ments took a per­sonal turn for the worse. I was talk­ing with Leisa this morn­ing, and we both agreed that it would be inter­est­ing to ana­lyse the dif­fer­ences, and the huge dif­fer­ence in the tone of the com­ments provided.

Brave, Stu­pid, or Inspired?

This comes back to one of the ini­tial points I made. Design by com­mit­tee does not work. Why is that? Per­son­ally, I think it’s due to the rel­at­ively small size of a ‘com­mit­tee’. Say you have a cli­ent, and there are 15 stake­hold­ers. All of them have strong opin­ions, there are big egos fly­ing around. In fact, I had a cli­ent like this a short while ago, and it was a prime example of how work­ing in this envir­on­ment does not work. 

Gen­er­ally, in that group, there will be one or two loud voices. Maybe an Alpha Male or two. The import­ant thing to note is that this is a small group. It will be dif­fi­cult to reach com­mon ground with a small amount of people.

Design­ing by com­munity I feel is dif­fer­ent. There are a lot of people in the Drupal com­munity. Many hun­dreds with a strong voice. Provid­ing very early releases–in fact, open­ing up the pro­cess completely–draws reac­tion. Within that reac­tion, if there is enough of it, we can identify trends. And I think trends in feed­back is the key to Design­ing By Community. 

Where next?

Leisa and I will con­tinue to work as openly as we feel appro­pri­ate for the pro­ject. If it falls flat on its arse in the near future, well it will make a bloody good case study.