Handful of Nothing

This will be quite short (it never is I know), but it’s the idea behind the main problem I am studying how to solve:

There’s not today a simple way to really improve the UI on most of FOSS big softwares. Why?
Ownership. Open source projects are most of the time product of the need of a specific individual, most of the time a talented developer, that indeed has a problem or a desire. He starts the work, gets something done, some friends join to help and a new software is born.

This is beautiful and it’s indeed the way most of the important and nice projects came to life. After this you have some roles into the project, but the main one is the “maintainer” role. This guy is the responsible for what goes in and out of the project.

So how on earth do you expect to all of them simply to give up their position to another guy, how cannot get anything working (after all he’s just a interaction designer) and comes saying that everything should be different, some of the things should be actually quite stupid or crap (in the maintainers view) and when you decide to listen to the users, you realize that the only users that are “active” or online where you search for them, are most of the time other developers and not the real base of regular, end-users.

You get stones in the face. You get flames about not being a good way to do stuff, that this is the totally wrong way bla bla bla. Because there’s now a “community” for that software, not of the users but a community of those who help it born. So they love their software, they have a small felling that will always break a new, disruptive way of working. Ownership.

So comes the question : how to have both core developer and a core designer working together? Trusting each other and understanding the first rule: YOU (both) are not the user. We are creators. We have too much power, and with that comes the need to step out of our arrogance and do things we do not like. People may think I like Canola’s UI more than anything else for me. No. My favorite UI is more along Jeff Haskin’s invisible UI or Quicksilver on the Macintosh computers than the icon based way of Canola. My favorite graphical UI is more a grid based level-digging zooming UI than Canola. But this is not ready for the end user. This is ready for me (and I think it’s indeed quite risky still)

Back to the question, how to elevate a UI designer to a position that nowaday is 100% taken by developers (by full merit) and how would be the mechanisms to do so with the Designers? (and I’m not talking about the Icons and UI designers out there) I know that are some interesting projects like openusability.org but this is not enough. Even inside companies it’s not common to see a good Designer - Developer symbiosis and without this, again this will make a lot of people angry : there will not be a real good user experience around the open source based software. And for the developers, by user experience we are talking about everything in the OS, not only a fancy UI like Elisa on the desktop or Canola on the tablets, but the whole mental model of a daily user, internet,media hungry user being taken into account when designing a simple project. Integration, unity in every single contact of the user with your device, not only when using it but also when improving it, updating it, charging it, synchronizing it and so on.

Now we are half of the way to accomplish what we wanted. The team in Manaus already submited all their logos. I have 2 favorites among those. Now the team recife is finishing creating the custom Fonts (as they need to be free) and have also some submissions coming. I am quite happy with the team work, that in the middle of a lot of projects achieved a good quality in short time. Branding is a really complicated field. Not in the sense of opening a application and doing it, or the research needed behind.. but in the fact that it will NEVER please everyone (like almost everything else) and will always bring bad comments from all sides. But I think that’s the beauty… and we are ready for both things, if you like them… Vote :) if you don’t you can always call us retarded here in the comments :)

You can read each logo’s concept on the submission wiki : here
As It’s difficult to have favorites, I can say that I like quite a lot this 2 : logo numb 2 from Affonso, and number 1 from Glauber. Also the completely different style from Miguel’s logo is quite catchy. Without doubt the best humored logo :)

So We are a small country (at least if you compare to China) but we have more than 100 million mobile phone users (I think the last number I saw was something like 120mil lines. Apple’s partner (America movil) opened a registration for those interested in the Apple 3G iPhone and got 100k guys there. They didn’t say what the plan is going to be, but is not going to be less than 99 Brazilian Reais (1/4 of a minimum salary) and for sure there will be a fee + taxes (not free iPhone for plans under 300 reais / monthly).

This give us the following scenario :
a. It seems that there’s something like 200k users already in Brazil (using jailbroken phones) + the 100k or a little bit more users from the other carries, we can arrive at a number of 500k possible clients. so if iPhone reaches 1 million in one year will be quite a achievement… but how much does it represent? less than 1%. I strongly believe that they will be confined to the 500k-600k clients, half of them non-official from 2g models, so no revenue, no unlimited data plan and a maximum 0,5% market share. It seems that the High end phones market in Brazil is something around 5% giving this ~10% to Apple which is not bad, but also is not 100% official, profit generating iPhones like the official ones sold by the carriers.

I think my previous comment will start to make sense once the phone hit’s the stores :)

I think I miss listening to the Cranberries :)