design

Table of Contents Design Principles SecureDrop UxD Resources Learning GitHub Issues UX Friends of SD (archive) Experience Design Projects General User Experience Design Resources (UxD) Design nrrdery Design for A11y & Accessibility Design for Localization Writing For Usability Methodologies Etc

Design Principles

What are we trying to achieve in design solutions? Are there shared experiential values among the team we all agree we'd like to see reflected in our built environments? Below is our approach, to date. Don't agree with something, or want to add something? That's part of the process, bring it up in a forthcoming meeting! Nina's presentation on design principles has resources that can help inform how to put these to work. "It's not personal, it's a team design principle!"

1. Design for users Whistleblowers are a wide and varied group of humans. Journalists, NGO workers, server admins, and business folks interested in bringing SecureDrop to their organizations, are among the many types of humans that use SecureDrop on the newsroom side of things. Check in with the Who Are Our Users? page early and often!

2. Guide behavior to inform safe choices Behavior. What the user can grok in the moment and connect to behavioral actions. Knowledge-informing text is for articles, not in-app text. Cognition » behavior, not learning » memory. Martin should be an especially good person to guide this, having done user research.

3. Clarity + Calm in visual & written language choices. Reduce cognitive friction, cultivate calm. Written language(s), visual language, semiotics; the complete experience journey. Especially challenging when expected Javascript elements being absent, can… well, create confusion.

4. Clear, human, humble, neutral Aesthetics should be visually appealing and easy to consume, without calling attention to the artifacts themselves. SD is the messenger, not the message.

5. ACAB "Policing" approaches to opsec guidance come from the best of intentions, yet carry as many not-obvious drawbacks as policing in civil society does. Unfortunately, wishy-wash wrapped in too many words, is often employed as its alternative. There is a middle ground—and we need to strive towards finding that. It is hard, but The Force is strong with this one. Reading: Abolish the Design Police Inside Your Head

SecureDrop UxD Resources

Learning

• design framework preso nina did to provide structure to how/why ui design problems get solved as they do.
• Divio's guide to writing usable documentation; often referenced by erik for writing SD docs.

GitHub Issues

• Active tasks in this repo
  • Created by @ninavizz to track projects while in a more contained research/design phase; a means of working outside broader team collab that we're looking to depart from.
• Active tasks in the main SD project repo
  • For the Source, Journalist, and Admin web (Tor browser) experiences
  • Things on the full team's radar, and are being worked with as fully collaborative projects
  • Major usability issues and findings from testing, typically live here
• Active tasks in the SecureDrop Workstation **client** repo
  • Things specific to the QT client apps (two, as of this writing—the updater and the main app) created for the Qubes OS based SecureDrop Workstation
• Active tasks in the SecureDrop Worksation main repo
  • Why be straightforward, when we can be just a touch confusing? This repo will rarely have any UX needs, as it's specific to how Salt and other Qubes OS things are configured.

UX Friends of SD

• TorProject's UX team page
  • TorProject icons New icons we may need to incorporate into SD ux or documentation, hopefully live here.
    • Many of the icons on this page, and everywhere else I've been able to find in +1hr of websurfing, are out of date. They are typically tweaked for sharpness and clarity in display, when moved into production—or, as is the case with Antonella's "New Onion," they're outright absent from here.

(archive) Experience Design Projects

Design on today's SecureDrop Source web interface and Journalist web interface are ongoing. We encourage new folks interested in contributing to this work to browse the SecureDrop Issues flagged as UX. Broader efforts outside of the above, are captured in our User Experience Design issues. Below are pages for larger efforts happening:

• Qubes Journalist Workstation
  • Major research and design project to combine today's SVS and JWS into a single device experience
• UxD Projects Backlog: What is something that could benefit from a proper design effort?
• Inventory of written content to make nomenclature consistent across all SecureDrop touchpoints

General User Experience Design Resources (UxD)

Design nrrdery

• IxDA Portland's Goodreads
  • Recommended books on various UX topics
  • Curated by Nina & other PDX UX peeps
  • Integrated with Amazon; pls learn about the books on Goodreads or Amazon, but make any purchases from a local used bookstore or from Powells. :)

Design for A11y & Accessibility

• Article covering things to do with Colorblindness & Accessibility

Design for Localization

• Great article from USDS on writing and designing for localization
  • Nice article about user centered notification patterns & copywriting best practices.

Writing For Usability

• • https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/ Writing usable documentation
  • Material's quick/clear reference guide on values and dos/donts
  • US Digital Service's Plain Language Styleguide ...an intensely excellent resource, packed with examples!

Methodologies Etc

• • On HCD methodologies to make user-centric digital products (what SecureDrop is maturing into).
  • GV UX Articles Library on Medium. No, I don't favor the big-evil-G, they just hire an assload of deeply experienced and prolific UX folks. 😃
  • SimplySecure Blog Great articles about keeping the user at the center of open-source projects, and about design particulars in infosec.
  • Needsfining Framework from SecondMuse (IFF producers)