As IT managers, we are probably the first to advocate for the right tool for the right job. However, we continually seem to hire a relative monoculture of IT professionals, thinking that if we just add another programmer all our problems will be solved! After talking with many IT managers across higher ed, it appears that UI design (whether it be User Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design, or Information Architecture) is rarely a formal part of their cycle or designers a regular part of the team. If UI Designers are part of the team, they are often so sparse a resource as to absolutely ensure that they won't have enough time to get engaged early enough or long enough. This means that the few teams that are able to contribute UI designers to an open source effort, have a hard time being impactful. This is made worse by the fact that designers are often embedded in distributed teams and not looking across the product, inhibiting a holistic user-centered approach.
This inevitably creates a gap between expectations and deliverables and creates a tension that is exacerbated by the lack of recognition for UI deliverables that arrive unaccompanied by code.
Another challenge in creating applications for academia is that many of the user goals are embedded in pedagogical methods that may be discipline specific or not expressed in a generalizable way. Instructional designers and faculty are rarely part of a development team. In the higher education community source environment we have an opportunity to remedy this. It may require reaching across local organizational divides to ensure that the user and instructional goals are adequately being met: Often, instructors don't speak the language of technology, so the instructional designer can help translate, generalize, and communicate their needs. In turn, the instructional designer often doesn't speak the language of the application programmer, and the UI designer can help translate and represent their needs within the design and work flow of the application for the developers. This diagram 1 attempts to express the relationship between these different areas of expertise.
The transparency of open source projects in higher education helps development and instructional support teams engage faculty and students in the process of creating the online environment that they need. We are uniquely situated smack dab in the middle of our own usability lab. There are few commercial or open source environments that can count themselves as this lucky. One of the biggest barriers to implementing a user centered design process that I have heard from UI Designers working in the private sector is their inability to gain consistent access to their users. Let's make the most of our opportunity!
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