[ux] Tor UX Team Vision Brainstorm

[Pili Guerra]

Hi everyone, 

Here is the write up from our UX Vision Brainstorm last week.

We started off as usual with a discussion on the need for a UX Team at Tor. Here is what we feel the UX Team’s role is as well why it is important to have a UX Team within Tor:

Helping to develop usable tools that people can and want to use, to create a positive feedback loop of more users == increased anonymity set for each of these users
Making it easier for new users to adopt and use Tor as an essential step in scaling Tor
Helping users to make the most out of using Tor
Advocating for putting the user at the center of our development processes

There were a lot of great comments from everyone which I think can be condensed into the 4 statements above, but feel free to add in any which I may have missed out!

Next we went through the challenges the UX team faces which are mainly around user understanding (both for our team to understand our users and for the users to understand our products) as well as user adoption:

UX is the difference between using and not using Tor for most people - In the past UX has been a barrier which is steadily being lowered
Designing our own proceses of work
Developing a fine-grained understanding of users' mental models when using tor browser
The constant struggle between having the most secure browser and having the most usable browser. Is it possible to have both?
Potentially “degraded” experience for users when using a “normal” browser versus Tor Browser, e.g increased latency, broken functionality on websites, increased number of captchas
The sheer number of use-cases and user mental models/personas to cater for within Tor Browser

Although we did not explicitly discuss this, from these problems we identified a number of opportunities the UX Team can develop in future: 

Making it more politically difficult to restrict use of TB by increasing the user base of 'ordinary people’ - this should be a joint effort with the Community Team
Measuring and Documenting broken functionality when using Tor Browser and educating organisations running web services on making their services more Tor-Friendly
Finding ways for more people to use and contribute to the Tor network, e.g
Developing re-usable application libraries to make it easier for application developers to use the Tor network
Improving the experience of setting up a Tor Relay

Finally we discussed the ideal state of the UX Team in 2 years time. During the past few years, at a high level, we have been working on bridging the gap between our users and the software development process as well as developing a coherent visual language for people to recognise the Tor Project. To get us started on thinking about the next 2 years, Antonela shared with us her vision for the ideal UX Team composition in future:  https://share.riseup.net/#i9JssTxjvZICU0cSL8ch3A <https://share.riseup.net/#i9JssTxjvZICU0cSL8ch3A> 
Based on current demand, by the end of the next 2 year period, we would want to have dedicated UX teams (comprising of a designer, researcher and product manager) for each of our products. 

These are some of the points that came up during the discussion and that we want to do/keep doing: 

Involve more designers in order to have discussions about design from an “expert” point of view
Keep finding ways to educate users as they use the different products, although we want to keep our main focus on Tor Browser for now.
Develop greater affordances within the product as well as providing quality educational materials
Develop a design system and tools to allow us to provide inclusive and consistent solutions to user problems
Develop the most secure and usable browser in the market
Keep working with all the other teams at Tor Project to ensure excellent UX across products
Continue to support Tor Browser as a more concrete way for ordinary people to understand the Tor Network
Influence the direction and focus of other teams

I hope this can serve as a good starting point for further discussion and at the same time for us to focus on our priorities when new funding opportunities come up. You can find the full meeting logs here: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-02-26-13.58.log.html <http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-02-26-13.58.log.html>

Thanks!

Pili
—
Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams
pili at torproject dot org 
gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45

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