Well as a designer, its not realy easy to help on opensource projects. Its hard to join something like that and if you do, the projects themselves usualy need UX design not some pretty colors and some logo. But thats exactly what engeneers mostly want. I dont blame them, they spend lot of effort to make the project and they have their own ideas about how it should work (for them).
But good UX is about objectivity and about efficiency. Its also a process.
Another thing is that there is no tradition in that for designers. Opensource programming free time fun project for programmer is equivalent maybe something like making print posters for designers.
And interaction design schools are hardly helping that, they should make students to help out on opensource projects maybe as part of their assignments/diplomas.
How would i join opensource projects that need designers? I dont know.
I always found this interesting, I get on with and learn more quickly interfaces built by other programmers even when such interfaces are regarded as "badly designed" by none-programmers.
I think it's because as a programmer my mental model more closely matches that of another programmer.
Which is terrifying when I do UX stuff myself because then I worry I'm building stuff for other programmers when I'm aiming at general users.
The problem is that you have much higher understanding of the inner parts of software. You might group functions together by type pf operation you do, by used algorythm... Your mind knows that these are operations that work with memory so you look there.
For example average user has mostly no understanding of things like reading data into memory and that it must be saved aferwards. For him the edit is already on the screen, like when you write on paper.
Also ux quality is imposible to measure. Lot of times its desicions between Ok bot not great vs Ok but not great.
The biggest problem on opensource projects is no consistent unifying philosophy, no aim. Users can learn anything, it just has to be consistent. Lot of times there is one developer wanting to see every posible function on the sceen, second one is making contextualy avare menus and thir one believes in text input search. Three of those together are just a mess.
But good UX is about objectivity and about efficiency. Its also a process.
Another thing is that there is no tradition in that for designers. Opensource programming free time fun project for programmer is equivalent maybe something like making print posters for designers.
And interaction design schools are hardly helping that, they should make students to help out on opensource projects maybe as part of their assignments/diplomas.
How would i join opensource projects that need designers? I dont know.