Five members (me, Kari aka ‘Kp’, Jouni, Oopee and Tere) of Open Coral project gathered in a live meeting 2.12.2011 at University of Tampere. It seems that this group of members will function as ad hoc “UX Team”. The same punch of developers and designers might form more coherent team in the future, but that is not necessary at the moment. The team seems to have a good flow as it is. After the meeting it became evident that some teams need live meetings more than others. UX team is one of those teams. A few words about Open Coral project.
About Open Coral
Open Coral is a open source information integrating platform for efficient communication, resource allocation, and leadership in OSS ecosystems. Open Coral integrates Diaspora* functionality to open source projects, enables open and transparent cooperation between users, developers and companies. More can be found form http://www.open-coral.org and from previous blog entry Unified Universal Open Source Dashboard
First UX iteration
Let’s take a look at the results from our first UX meeting. During the meeting we worked (in turns) around drawing board and it functioned as a center for all discussions. Obviously it does not make much sense for others than those participating meeting. For the team it is important. It does tell the team what we are doing, what is the logic of development, what are the concepts involved and it include tasks (those numbers inside circles) that need to be done next.
UX-meeting-drawing
One of the members (Kari) had done enormous and incredible job just the night before meeting. He had designed first sketches about the UI/UX. The rest of us were totally amazed! Having such designs is vital for us, designs give us something to start with even if we don’t agree on every detail right away. Now we have something to implement and iterate.
I will not discuss the model in details. Here’s some screen shots from the presentation. You can find the presentation from http://prezi.com/t2aoucbszpp6/opencoral/.
Below is the planned main view, which can contain several ‘widgets’, which in turn can be placed freely (drag & drop style). Widgets have different sizes and content types. Widgets all share one feature – they all represent a ‘story’, which is formed from timeline. The ‘screen shots’ are in Finnish but that does not prevent getting the idea. The Open Coral platform will be provided in several languages, but first one will be in English. More translations will be done later.
Open Coral UI main view sketch
User can select one item to view for example one project from ‘My Projects’. That in turn opens a view which might look like below.
Open Coral UX-sketch - widget view
From the above view user can select different items for closer inspection. In the example, users selects one participant of the project from the project timeline.
User selects one participant of the project for closer inspection
This will open a view about the selected user’s/participant’s profile, something like below.
Open Coral UX-sketch - profile view
The above images are the first plans. This is from where we start to iterate. If you want to be part of the future, join Open Coral community.
Looking for ‘Ruby & JS gurus’
The above images shows that we have vision, we have talent. What we don’t have at the moment is enough ‘Ruby and JS gurus’. If you got interest about Open Coral, read more from our site http://open-coral.org and join us.
Content is available under 
2011, Jarkko Moilanen. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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