As a developer or user experience (UX) practitioner, you know that early and frequent feedback from users is a necessary part of ensuring your project’s success. However, finding users with relevant experience to participate in UX research activities is often a barrier - especially for highly technical enterprise applications. That gives UXers working in open source a big advantage. By their very nature, open source projects include communities of users who are experienced with and passionate about the projects they contribute to. Community members and contributors have a vested interest in improving their project’s ease of use, making them ideal and enthusiastic user research participants.

We’ll talk about:
- How our UX team engaged with the upstream Kubeflow community for an AI-related research project
- Challenges we encountered while conducting research with community members
- Lessons we learned from our experience