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Nina Eleanor Alter edited this page Feb 27, 2022 · 141 revisions

Once more, but with feeling: Please never post information about specific SecureDrop users (Sources, Journalists, or Admins) to this public wiki.

Table of Contents

Welcome!

SecureDrop developers and UX practitioners work collaboratively on almost everything. A blab nina wrote with some th0ts...

UX practitioners are not keepers of some guarded skill or mystical talent. Design is a craft, no different from engineering; it takes years of practicing a craft to do it well and in an informed fashion. Yet everybody is also a designer, in practice. Small decisions in our everyday work vs focused practice.

Perspectives are often needed from non-practitioners of each craft to push that craft's boundaries, and sometimes perspectives or specialized execution are needed from skilled practitioners.

Learning happens through critique, through dialog, and through open sharing. Nobody is an "expert;" only "skilled practitioners" and "enthusiasts," whom all come together in projects as makers. Respect & reciprocity in balance, with service to our end users as a shared goal. At the end of the day all of our work is stronger and everybody has more fun, when we come together like this.

UX Meetings

Public meetings are scheduled bi-weekly. You don’t need to be "a member" of the UX team to participate. Just show-up and introduce yourself! RSVP's are appreciated, and meeting agendas typically come together on the meeting wiki page, ad-hoc, the day before.

Contribute

Open, community-based software projects developing tools for humans real needs, need user-centered research and design. Compelled to contribute? Read-on, and please do!

  • Please review our Code of Conduct should you choose to contribute.
  • Drop on into the SecureDrop channel in Gitter to introduce yourself & read about current happenings.
    • Note: As the UX:Dev ratio has much more developers working on SD, there's not much discussion of UX on Gitter... but the few of us doing UX always loves other friendlies dropping in to say hi—and all our developers love having more UX folk on board! :)

SecureDrop UX

Touchpoints + Tech Contexts

The user-facing portion of SecureDrop exists on two distinct platforms—the SecureDrop Workstation experience on a Qubes OS laptop, and three distinct web experiences (Sources, Journalists, Admins)—that folks work with on the Tor Browser, or on Tor within the Tails OS experience. It is suggested that Sources use Tor from Tails, but it's unlikely that most do; whereas for Journalist and Admin users it is a requirement. The Journalist experience (JI) is a web UI, whereas the Admin experience is mostly on the command-line.

Accordingly the SecureDrop UIs are split between QT created clients (a main client and an updater client), and Javascript-free (mostly) web pages. For the Source UI, everything must work without Javascript—and for the Journalist UI, "nice to have" things can require Javascript, but the core experience must work without it. All of the "No Javascript" stuff, is to enable users to access SecureDrop from their Tor Browser with its security setting set to "Safest." For design, the primary impacts are 1. No use of Google (or other remote) font libraries, and 2. No dynamic anythings... from :active states on buttons, to reflecting the number of (or named) items to delete, download, etc.

Everything has been migrated into Figma, from 2018 and on. @ninavizz created most of those files, and may be reached with any questions. To learn about how we use Figma with SecureDrop, all you could ever want and more » boom!

SecureDrop Users

We design for users that need security and anonymity—and while the security part of that is essential, our users are still human! Learn about who those humans are on our Users page.

SD Design Resources

  • Brand Use Use guidelines for customers, and correct file/directory links as well as general guidance, for internal folks Y'all will get there! For now, it's a brain-dump from Nina's head. :)
  • UI Standards & Guidelines Not quite a styleguide, but as close as we'll likely get—a concise documentation of standards the team has all agreed we'd like to work towards, where we're not already there—and to keep in place, unless explicitly agreed to do differently.
  • Prototypes Archive of noteworthy prototypes created to demonstrate functional ideas for the Source UI, SecureDrop Workstation, or Journalist Web UI, or for user testing.
  • SD Figma Learn about how the SD team uses Figma, here, and if you'd like to contribute as an editor—just ask Erik for perms! They're $15/mo/user, so we are keen to restrict editor access to only folks active on projects, and known contributors.
  • Everything else including our design principles, projects archive, learning materials, and helpful general resources, can be found there!

General Resources

Best practice guides for user-centric decisions and activities for design/research practitioners and non-practicioners, alike!

Frontend Dev

  • Peter Coolingridge's SVG Optimiser Tool. Nina's favorite; it requires cut-and-paste of big/messy SVG text to get tidier SVG text, but it's a great tool—and the best I've yet seen.
  • WebAim Accessibility tool
  • Bi-directionality in Localization best practices via the fine folks on the material.io team!
  • Patternfly library
    • Sweet resource with great functional examples (and code, and annotated mockups!) of various app and webpage components.
    • No bandwidth to get a designer on it? Find a pattern complete with code, here!
    • Note: these patterns appear to be both open-source and tested, so I would not recommend changing them—unless there is a concrete or functional reason why.

Experience Design (UxD)

User Research (UxR)

Applied research to learn about users, and ethnographic or product discovery research to inform what to make and how to make stuff work well for humans.

General Interest

  • IxDA Portland's Goodreads
    • Recommended books on various UX topics
    • Curated by Nina & other PDX UX peeps
    • Integrated with Amazon; pls learn about the books on Goodreads or Amazon, but make any purchases from a local used bookstore or from Powells. :)
  • Methodologies + Values

SecureDrop UX Resources

  • TorProject's UX team page
    • TorProject icons New icons we may need to incorporate into SD ux or documentation, hopefully live here.
      • Many of the icons on this page, and everywhere else I've been able to find in +1hr of websurfing, are out of date. They are typically tweaked for sharpness and clarity in display, when moved into production—or, as is the case with Antonella's "New Onion," they're outright absent from here.
  • New Study template page
    • Includes outgoing links to current/past study research plans, discussion guides, and other artifacts
  • Screenshots from the current (Sep 2018) Journalist and Source UIs
  • A smattering of other pages that discuss combined design/research efforts from past Journalist Interface (web) ux work
  • In-progress Personas work for Source and Journalist users (journalist linked artifacts tbd)
  • Newsroom profiles and journey maps documenting SecureDrop workflows linked artifacts tbd
  • Redaction Guide
    • Taking notes of a user working with the product, of a user interview, or a straight transcript of either? Awesome!
    • Out of respect for research participants it is a UX industry standard to always redact notes and/or transcripts, before sharing with a broader team. For SecureDrop, the need to protect participant and contributor safety is clearly more urgent.
    • Please NEVER share notes or transcripts from a research session, before fully redacting.
      • If using GitHub Wiki, GDocs, or any tool that preserves document history, please be mindful to cut-and-paste redacted text into a new document, and to ONLY share that document.

User Research

As a project developed inline with open design values, publicly available and easy to consume evidence of user needs as uncovered through human-centered research, is vital.

  • UxR Page, see sidebar!

Call For Global Facilitators

We welcome one and all to contribute in helping us learn more about the needs of journalists, whistle-blowers, IT folks managing or installing SecureDrop instances, and how SecureDrop impacts the work of each. We especially need research facilitation help in countries outside the United States and Western Europe, fluent in both English and the local languages. Countries in the Middle East, Russia, Asia, Africa, and South America, are of especially high importance to secure volunteer resources in.

Interested? Please add yourself to our list of UX community volunteers—and specify your interest in research facilitation. Location and language skills are the only things we are unprepared to offer guidance in—everything else, is cake. :)

Experience Design Projects

Design on today's SecureDrop Source web interface and Journalist web interface are ongoing. We encourage new folks interested in contributing to this work to browse the SecureDrop Issues flagged as UX. Broader efforts outside of the above, are captured in our User Experience Design issues. Below are pages for larger efforts happening:

Who Uses SecureDrop?
Learn about SecureDrop's users!

Design

Contributors

Learn!

User Research

Et cetera

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