Design Contribution Guidelines
Describe the series of guidelines and requirements to be able to contribute with design-related efforts to Open Collective
As an open community, Open Collective Design aims for designing new ways to create, share and deliver value from a design point of view.
What do I need to know first?
What are the values of Open Collective?
Design Principles
The exponential growth of mobile technology has ushered in an age where time and attention is an increasingly scarce resource. Instead of technology enhancing our abilities as humans, we’ve seen it become a vehicle for extracting our attention, monetizing our personal information, and exploiting our psychological vulnerabilities.
As designers, we play a key role in the creation of such technology, and it’s time we take responsibility for the impact that these products and services we build are having on people it should serve.
These principles are meant to provide guidance for designing Open Collective as an ethically humane digital product through patterns focused on user well-being.
1. Empowering
Empowering products enhance our abilities as humans without dictating our behavior by enabling us to accomplish our objective when we need it, and remaining out of the way when we don’t. We can achieve this by ensuring products center on the value they provide to people over companies.
Give people the control they need to manage the algorithms that shape their experiences.
Give people the control they need to manage privacy and anonymity.
Enable focus by avoiding unnecessary notifications.
"Utility alone won’t assuage us. We want empowerment. We want to be better people. We want technology to enhance our capabilities and increase our sense of agency without dictating the rhythm of our lives.”
Jesse Weaver
2. Finite
Bottomless feeds and auto-play keep users from leaving but lock them into an infinite loop of consumption. We can maximize the overall quality of time spent by bounding the experience and prioritizing meaningful and relevant content.
3. Inclusive
Thinking inclusively is about considering diverse groups of people, how they will interact with your product, and their environments. It's a methodology that puts people's needs first and foremost to expand the reach of the product to the largest range of users possible.
3. Respectful
Attention has become the scarce commodity of the digital age. As designers, we must consider how we deliver notifications to ensure we are respectful of their time, attention and overall digital well-being.
4. Thoughtful
The presumption that reducing friction is virtuous onto itself is dangerous. We can embrace thoughtful friction to prevent harm and abuse, protect people's privacy and security, and steer them towards healthier digital habits.
5. Transparent
Lack of transparency erodes trust in a product. We can prevent this erosion by demanding that the products we design are clear and honest about the data that’s being collected from users and why it’s being collected, how this data will be used, and avoiding dark patterns that exploit human psychological vulnerabilities.
The process
Exploration/Ideation:
Understanding the context (Particular and general) that the project involves, and think about specific solutions to that project.
Creation/Definition:
Flesh out the design solutions, documenting the process.
Reflection/Iteration:
Prototyping and testing
Implementation:
Launching the solution with a public release.
How do I get started?
The Tools (Design & Management)
Figma is the design tool of OC design, every interface design will be hosted inside this design repository. And it serves to fellow designers to contribute with their craft, and also for non-designers working with OC Design to obtain information and resources of the design toolkit of the organization.
The first thing you encounter with is this primary breakdown of the work:
UX/UI Contribution
Most of the projects related with interface design will be hosted inside the 02 → OpenCollective.com folder, that breaks down again the efforts with this organization:
The next level is each individual file, that may include several interface elements, pages and flows of the platform and the website, it looks something like this:
Here you can obtain assets, individual characteristics of each elements and make specific questions.
All of these naming conventions are consistent along the other digital tools.
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Every task is linked with the OpenCollective team and the code repository through GitHub.
To better understand GitHub and its functioning we encourage you to consult its knowledge base.
We break down big goals to specific tasks using the following logic:
There are different ways to get in the loop of design-related tasks in GitHub:
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