Designing an open source social network.
This work was completed as the main component of my summer 2015 internship at Red Hat. While at this internship, I worked under close supervision with the lead designer for the Fedora operating system. I designed interfaces and interactions for a social network conceptualized to centralize communications and contributions for open-source contributors to Fedora.
In the spirit of open source creation, I wrote several blog posts as I was working in order to provide project transparency and community involvement; each of them details the logic behind my design decisions for a given aspect of the Hubs interface and can be found on my Wordpress site.
I began the project with whiteboard sketching and brainstorming.
I began by creating the admin screens for creating a new “hub”
I was given a set of initial concepts to use as inspiration and brand guidelines; following those designs, I created a few different sets of interactions to flesh out the full needs of the Fedora Hubs experience.
Users can both join and subscribe to hubs
For easy access to these hubs, a list of the hubs each user “follows” is collected sitewide in the header area of Fedora Hubs. As many as will fit across the top of the screen will display there, and the rest will collapse into a dropdown at the right-hand side of the screen.
Users also have the ability to manage, rearrange, and edit their bookmarked hubs.
Privacy is a key concern for Hubs users
Interviews with our unique target audience of open source community members informed our team that many of our primary users were incredibly resistant to using more traditional forms of social media, and uniquely concerned with privacy and security above almost all other goals. With this in mind, I ensured that the details of each user’s open source contributions would only be visible to people they had personally approved.
This mockup shows the public view of a personal hub.
This same personal profile shows significantly more information for hubs users who have been added as subscribers.