[ux] Is 2018 and UX will kick ass!! First 2018 week status check in :)

[isabela]

Hello there!

Was chatting with Antonela and this week *we won't have irc check in
meeting* (which happens on Tuesday's) but just do it via email as folks
are traveling etc.

First of all, happy 2018! I want to share an overall 2018 update with
y'all before going to my weekly status update (and folks should reply to
this email sharing theirs as well :)

The UX team has big plans for 2018!
=======================

First we plan to have all portals done by summer! Our main milestone is
the Tor Meeting in March where we hope to have a prototype of all sites
up for everyone to check them out and give us feedback.

If you have been following our check in meetings, folks are already
coding support.torproject.org and designing the other portals. So this
shit is happening \o/

We also know we don't know what is good for the user. (hehehe)
========================================

And we must test what we build with them to actually know if we are
doing it right. This is the must crucial piece for our team to function.
So in 2018 we hope to add another member to our team to be our User
Research Coordinator.

We also want to put in place the structure for this person to succeed at
their work while doing it 'Tor's style' which is with user privacy and
security as the center of everything we do. And is with that in mind
that we are building a way to do user testing with the help of trainers
and users all around the world, by creating a direct interaction with
them instead of collecting behavioral data on them. Our user testing
program has already started with a few pilots and we have more coming up
in 2018, but our ultimate goal is to have it scale to a stage where
anyone who would like to help test and give us feedback on user facing
features will know how to do it.

Having this user feedback process on everything we build will help us
ensure we continue to iterate and improve our tools so they work for our
users.

Our roadmap for 2018 has already some big changes on the user experience
for Tor Browser desktop that we must get feedback from our users. We
will be working with the Tor Browser for Android team to bring these
experiences to mobile and we will have to test that as well. All the
portals experiences will also need to be tested, specially the download
flow. So as you can see the user testing work will be one of the most
important ones for us in 2018.

If we build all the things we want to build and are capable of showing
that to users in a way that they can give us feedback about it.

If we are also capable of incorporating tasks to fix stuff related to
this feedback into the dev teams roadmaps ;P

We will end 2018 with a full user centered development cycle \o/

Now my update for the week
==================

I will be finishing the work plan for the sponsor related to all the
portals and the first user testing pilots in 3 countries we are targeting.
Will work on reports for sponsor4 that is ending this month! So I will
be quite busy with that, but hopefully will be catching up towards the
end of the week on user testing in India this month and other UX work.

:)

cheers,
isabela