Open Design: Five Lessons
The virtual Ubiquity team recently did an open redesign of the Ubiquity logo. The penultimate result (one more round of polish needed) was spectacular, as was the journey. The process even got some press.
Open design is hard. There are many opportunities for arguments to become entrenched and for a stop-energy to become insurmountable. For the Ubiquity logo redesign, none of these things happened. That’s mostly due to the passion and creativity of everyone that participated.
Along the way, five observations/lessons emerged:
(1) The process takes time. The freedom to do a couple iterations is key — giving enough to to absorb feedback and channel it into a better result. If there was one thing we could change about our redesign process, it would have been to budget more time for another iteration or two.
(2) Open-ended questions are answered in open-ended ways. If you want concretes answers, give concrete questions. The further in the design process you get, the more focused your questions should get.
(3) When making decisions, it helps to create a highly visible framework/rubric by which those decisions are being made/entries judged. This shapes and focuses the discussion and staves-off bike shedding.
(4) Have a focused point-of-contact to take feedback, incorporate it, and iterate on it. Although the Ubiquity logo design process was open, we had a single designer incorporating the feedback of many. This yielded a funneling process with a consensus conclusion, rather than a diverging process without a conclusion (a major danger with open design). In our case Sebastiaan de With was our gifted designer and point-of-contact.
(5) Constant communication is key. Use Twitter, blogs, news groups, etc. to keep the dialogue going among everyone in the community. Open design isn’t a one-way street, but it feels that way if there’s a dearth of communication. And when that happens it becomes a monologue, not a dialouge. (Thanks to John Slater for this observation).
Did anyone else have observations or lessons they learned from the Ubiquity logo redesign? Does anyone have wisdom gained from other open design projects?
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Tags: open design, ubiquity
John Slater
In my own experience with this sort of thing, I’ve found that communication is really the key…the more often you talk (or blog) about what you’re doing and what you want to achieve, the better.
You and Sebastiaan did a great job of that, and the final results look awesome. Nice work!
Aza Raskin
@John: That’s a great point. I’ll add it to the list :)
Alex Faaborg
I’ve found that regardless of how creative you are, a crowd of people will be collectively be more creative, so open design is guaranteed to be particularly valuable at the the initial brainstorming and conceptual phases of a project.
Sebastiaan
Great post, Aza. I really enjoyed seeing this process first-hand. Glad you did a write-up; I’ll link it up when I post my blog post about my visit to Mozilla.
Jay Goldman
Great post Aza! Important lessons for all design projects, not just open ones.
I would add one item to the list: having a very clearly defined objective at the beginning. That worked well with the logo redesign (objective: redesign the logo!), but is much tougher as the scope of your project gets larger. It was much harder, for example, when we did the Firefox 2 theme. The end goal was obvious (objective: redesign the theme!), but the motivations for reaching that goal were considerably more open to personal bias. Scoping the redesign for Firefox 3 by saying things like “We’re redesigning the browser to feel more platform native one each OS” really helps everyone to stay focused.
Zach Lym
The volume is too soft, especially compared to other websites. Up it a bit in post-editing : )
Aza Raskin
@Jay: That is an excellent point. Scoping, for any project, is possibly the most valuable thing one can do. In particular, knowing what the project isn’t is generally more important than knowing what it is.
Kevin Cannon
I think an open design process like this is fraught with dangers. As you say, bike shedding is such a huge issue. Too many people have personal preferences with colours shapes and metaphors. If a design process is not led right it is very easy to end up with a ‘design by committee’ which is just a mess of compromises. Also, it’s very easy to offer an opinion on design without properly engaging with the problem.
For that reason I would avoid too open a design process. I think instead there should be an open brief process. That means agreeing on the goal of the design project, what you want to communicate, who is your audience, if you want to the casual or formal and things like that. Create a design brief that people can agree on and pick a single designer you have confidence in and work based on that brief.
That focuses and following discussion. If the result matches the goals agreed upon then it is a success. This avoid discussing details surrounding style and focuses on meaning.
The whole idea of open source design is fascinating though, as many of the things that cause good design in the real world (strong leadership, key decisions, saying no) are harder to achieve within a group without a hierarchy.
Kevin Cannon
Oh, and you’ll probably find this discussion interesting about group decision making:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/07/group-decision-making
Roxie Brandeis
Nice. Thanks for posting this. Not sure that I completely understand it, but thanks for taking the time to write this out.