2025-09-19 –, 106 (Capacity 45)
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
Beginner - no experience needed
Vince is a Principal Interaction Designer on Red Hat’s user experience design team. He started his professional life as an electrical engineer and worked for six years before making the enlightened decision to attend graduate school to study what was then called human factors. He earned a Masters and Ph.D. in psychology from North Carolina State University. His thirty year career has spanned both hardware and software UX design along with some research and consulting. He is currently a UX designer on Red Hat’s OpenShift AI product, a platform for managing the lifecycle of predictive and generative AI models.
Jenn Giardino is a Senior Principal User Experience Designer at Red Hat with a range of experience from research and discovery to usability and accessibility. She’s currently leads a team of UX designers focused on creating intuitive and accessible interfaces for Red Hat OpenShift AI.