This is a common wish in F/OSS circles … and then the owners/maintainers of F/OSS projects make the process of contributing anything convoluted, difficult, and emotionally draining (via a whole lot of bikeshedding)1.
When F/OSS projects make contribution culture a thing, they’ll get contributors. Until then … ugh. No. They won’t.
1 Obligatory example: on a particular F/OSS game server a specific command by default gave this massive wave of output that was, for an average user, 95% useless. It listed things the user couldn’t participate in. AND it listed the small number of things the user could participate in first, ensuring it scrolled right off the screen before it could get spotted. A user with actual UX design experience posted a long and detailed critique, explaining the problems, explaining why the available suggested solutions were flawed, and made a concrete suggestion for keeping existing behaviour with a simple /all switch on the command while making the default useful for 95% of users. From a quick glance at the code base myself, I figured it would take the maintainers two hours tops to fully implement and test the recommended change. It was a trivial change to metadata in the command processor, not even an actual code change.
And she got “well akshuallied” to death. A bunch of programmers with zero knowledge of UX, no perceivable talent for tasteful design, and egos that got bruised by the suggestion that their output wasn’t perfect dumped on this poor woman (the fact she was a woman being, I suspect, a major factor) to the point she’s sworn never to get involved in suggesting anything for a F/OSS project ever again. Because F/OSS communities are just that toxic.
So solve that problem and you’ll get UI and UX designers galore. And maybe get people who’ll document too, provided you don’t tell them (literally!) that their contributions matter less than code. (Because nothing motivates contribution better than telling people doing the contributions that they don’t matter!)
This is a common wish in F/OSS circles … and then the owners/maintainers of F/OSS projects make the process of contributing anything convoluted, difficult, and emotionally draining (via a whole lot of bikeshedding)1.
When F/OSS projects make contribution culture a thing, they’ll get contributors. Until then … ugh. No. They won’t.
1 Obligatory example: on a particular F/OSS game server a specific command by default gave this massive wave of output that was, for an average user, 95% useless. It listed things the user couldn’t participate in. AND it listed the small number of things the user could participate in first, ensuring it scrolled right off the screen before it could get spotted. A user with actual UX design experience posted a long and detailed critique, explaining the problems, explaining why the available suggested solutions were flawed, and made a concrete suggestion for keeping existing behaviour with a simple /all switch on the command while making the default useful for 95% of users. From a quick glance at the code base myself, I figured it would take the maintainers two hours tops to fully implement and test the recommended change. It was a trivial change to metadata in the command processor, not even an actual code change.
And she got “well akshuallied” to death. A bunch of programmers with zero knowledge of UX, no perceivable talent for tasteful design, and egos that got bruised by the suggestion that their output wasn’t perfect dumped on this poor woman (the fact she was a woman being, I suspect, a major factor) to the point she’s sworn never to get involved in suggesting anything for a F/OSS project ever again. Because F/OSS communities are just that toxic.
So solve that problem and you’ll get UI and UX designers galore. And maybe get people who’ll document too, provided you don’t tell them (literally!) that their contributions matter less than code. (Because nothing motivates contribution better than telling people doing the contributions that they don’t matter!)