Scaling up and continuing this work

[Erioldoesdesign]

This study was one of the first to capture OSS designers' experiences across multiple weeks and see what patterns and insights we could learn about designers' participation in OSS. There are however, many missing components to this study and many aspects that would benefit the OSS community widely.

These include:

• Inviting more OSS projects and community members to interviews, including those who collaborate with designers

• Better understanding the ways in which different roles view design and designers alongside the purpose of the OSS

• Including different types of OSS projects (e.g. OSS with an academic research focus vs OSS that is a developer tool etc)

• Exploring ways that enable us to better understand the scale and type of OSS projects and their design challenges

• Investigating what design challenges are common across all/most OSS projects

• Investigating more of the designers' contribution motivations and history in interviews: From a subject matter expertise point of view, Time spent contributing or observing OSS, Intended goals for OSS participation

In the future, we’d like to directly observe designers to see how their design contributions move through design stages to implementation within the OSS. We believe this will reveal the nuance in communications, delegation and the time needed to overcome the design challenges discovered in this study.

In order to be inclusive, ensuring we have adequate support for the inclusion of non-English language speaking designers to participate fully in this study would ensure we have a more global perspective on OSS design.

And finally, simply repeating the study with regular cadence allows us and others interested in this research to find trends and changes.