Adaptive Path Blog

Working with Mozilla on their browser concept series gave Adaptive Path the unique opportunity to tackle a design project in the world of open source software. Joining an open source software project usually requires one thing: the ability to cut code. If you live in the world of functions, methods, Git, SVN, and SQL, you’ll find many a friend in open source. If you instead work with Photoshop, wireframes, sketches, and stickies, you’ll find it is a bit of a challenge to join an open source project. The community of developers has a history of shunning anyone who is a not programmer. Plus, open source software projects are not heavily promoted in the design community.

Adaptive Path and Mozilla are taking a stand to change that. The Aurora browser concept video is our first venture into the new world of open source design and, in keeping with both Adaptive Path’s and Mozilla’s core philosophies, we are sharing our insights into the design process and providing much of the original source material. Our hope is that others will be inspired to try their hand and release their own vision of the web browser of 2018.

The timing of this project could not be much better for galvanizing design participation in open source software. Competitions such as hack days put on by both large and small companies are including more and more design. We are seeing not only functional software come out of open source but also software that has a good design aesthetic. There is also more and more attention given to the user experience in software. I am especially interested in the intersection of UX and agile development. As user experience disciplines sync up with tried and true agile processes, developers and designers will both benefit by sharing their processes. An increased focus on UX overall will naturally increase its visibility in the open source community.

How can we continue to move design professionals onto open source projects? Along with partnering with big names like Mozilla, we can share our ideas in venues that get attention. Putting our experiences in open source design out into the world for public scrutiny can be daunting, but the pay off is a better understanding between designers and developers. I have already started my list of News Year’s resolutions and one of them is to join an open source project. After working on Aurora, I have renewed desire to seek out a project and make a real contribution. Will you offer you time and talent to open source as well?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Aurora. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.