With support from the Open Technology Fund Secure Usability and Accessibility Lab, UX Designers, User Researchers, Digital Security Trainers and OSS tool builders gathered at RightsCon 2023 for the Human Rights Centered Design convening. We held critical discussions about the challenges and opportunities that sharing user insights could bring to how OSS tools for human rights needs are built in ways that are more context sensitive and specific, and share these insights here

In 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open OSS teams understand how design processes and activities improve the usability of open source tools. This post outlines some key themes identifying challenges in OSS design adoption, and introduces the resources created in response to these challenges.

Part two in a series of three blogs. Here we outline part of our research process for the Usable Software Ecosystems Research project. USER is a Sloan Foundation supported research initiative that explores how open source scientific and research software teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects.

User research is about surfacing behavioral insights to design products. Build your knowledge of user research, including methods for conducting user interviews and ethics

FileZilla is a popular open-source file transfer protocol (FTP) tool. As part of the Open Technology Fund Usability Lab, we worked with the FileZilla Server team to complete user research and provide design recommendations toward the goal of guiding users on how to set up TLS certificates with explanation and reassurance. Here we share how we tackled a technical challenge as designers through strategic knowledge gathering.

We helped website security service Deflect appeal to a larger user base by identifying ways to attract and maintain both human rights organizations and businesses as customers.

As part of our collaboration with Mozilla’s YouTube Regrets project in 2020, our team mapped out and analyzed YouTube controls in order to understand how users are given the illusion of control to manage and limit YouTube’s recommendations.

As part of the IWMF-led Coalition Against Online Violence, our team provided research and design support for the Online Violence Response Hub, a new digital resource designed to assist and inform women journalists facing threats from online bullying and harassment.