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Subjectivity and design in FOSS projects
Introduction here
As alluded to above, it would seem that subjectivity does play a role in these design decisions. A developer even noted his own initial distaste for a user interface change but found that he might have been biased since he also said that “(…) I’ve used it for a while now and I’m kind of, you know, over it.” (Interview #7, Jellyfin). He also said about design that “It’s a very each to their own and it’s kind of caused some problems in the past internally in terms of like people, some people want to change some aspects of the UI, some don’t” (Interview #7, Jellyfin). The project members were asked about their feelings about how subjectivity takes part in making these design decisions, and if they felt that design is more subjective in nature. One contributor said that “I think there’s a mix of subjectivity and agreed upon rules for all of this.” (Interview #1, Jellyfin). This subjectivity is even a concern for some developers, for instance in interview #4 where the contributor said that “(…) I think a lot of it just comes down to needing a strong UX and design resource as far as guiding the project in a good direction that focuses on UX and design, as opposed to having many developers with their own sense of what is, or isn’t good design.” (Interview #4, Jellyfin). He continues to say that he feels the project is lacking some guidelines to align developer views and goals in the design department. One way to address making design decisions based on personal opinion is how the new Vue clients frameworks support their decision making process. The project makes use of the Vuetify plugin that has pre built templates and modules that are built with industry best practises in mind. One contributor that works on the Vue client expressed his positive experiences with this, as this way of working insures a baseline of modern and good UX (Interview #6, Jellyfin). In summary, it seems that Jellyfin could use a more coherent approach to avoid making decisions in each developer silo to support at coherent design experience, which the developer are interested in establishing between their clients (Interview #2, Jellyfin). Also, it would seem that this notion is not really broad up with regards to Taskcafe, however it makes sense as the friction described in Jellyfin is a product of developer to developer discussion which does not take place in Taskcafe as of yet.