Board,
I wanted to thank you for allowing the OpenStack UX team present at the board meeting.
Priorities before the Barcelona Summit
The focus of the OpenStack UX before Barcelona will be to collect deeper information on our customers including app developers and cloud operators. This will be at the expense of UX (GUI) design, but the immediate need is to generate a deeper understanding of cloud users.
Here are our research priorities before the Barcelona Summit:
Documentation
As you now, this has been a pain point for cloud operators, app developers, etc. The goal is to understand information needs and will extend beyond documentation to other potential solutions. At this point, we’re really focused on identifying the specific issues that our customers are experiencing. Of the studies, this will likely be our biggest effort because of the complexity of the research.
Application Developer recruitment survey
The goal of this survey is to create a pool of app developers that are willing to participate in research on behalf on the community. This group of personas can be difficult to recruit because they may not participate in community activities, such as the summits, and thus are not available through the normal channels.
Application Developer survey
The goal of this survey is to collect deeper, more focused data about app developers that is currently not being provided by the sem-annual survey. To be fair, the semi-annual user survey would take hours to complete if every working group or project was able to add questions.
Project Quotas
Based on an informal survey, quotas were identified by roughly ten companies as a major pain point for operators; presumably because they can be difficult to manage at scale, i.e. thousands of projects. The intent of this study
Persona validation
Survey to validate the proposed personas.
OpenStackClient usability
The goal is to continue to study the OpenStackClient because of it’s potential to impact the experience associated with OpenStackClient from cloud operators to app developers.
API
We’re still working with the API working group to understand their needs.
OpenStack Deployment/Configuration
We’re working with the team at OSIC to understand how to collect baseline information on the insulating experience.
I’m still chatting with the indiviudal project teams and work groups to develop the study plans, i.e. usability or survey, but all have expressed interest in collaborating on user research. Also, some of these efforts will occur in parallel.
This is a very aggressive schedule, so it hard to estimate whether we will be able to complete all of these research activities.
My take-aways from the board presentation:
* Consider presenting at the joint OpenStack Board/Technical Committee meetings
* Be more familiar with the responsibilities of the OpenStack Board and Technical Committee based on the OpenStack Bylaws
* Engage more closely with the User Committee
* Engage more closely with the various working groups including app ecosystem and API
Thanks,
Piet
Piet Kruithof
Sr User Experience Architect,
Intel Open Source Technology Group
Project Technical Lead (PTL)
OpenStack UX project