UBUNTU SDK

WHEN

2014 - 2015

COMPANY
Canonical Ltd.

WHAT I DID

UX Design

MY ROLE

When I joined Canonical I was initially part of the apps team within the Product Strategy department. I was responsible for designing the core user experience on the Dialler, Messaging and Address Book apps for Ubuntu Touch OS. Shortly thereafter I was promoted to UX Design Lead and took on the design of UX on SDK patterns and its documentation. The SDK is widely adopted by in-house and community/volunteer developers helping them to create converged applications for both Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Touch.

I led the work, producing a large number of SDK patterns, iterating them and presenting the outcomes to the Heads of UX and engineering. I also overlooked the implementation of the patterns by attending workshops with fellow designers and developers, iterating and polish existing patterns to its finalisation. I worked alongside several visual designers and a junior UX designer who I was mentoring.

Unfortunately Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Phone project.

THE CHALLENGE

This project had several previous design owners and on going contributors from the design and engineering side when I took it over. The two primary objectives however, never really changed:

1. Redesign and update existing components with latest UX and visual designs, aligning them with Ubuntu’s product vision and brand.

2. Identifying and designing missing UX and UI patterns in ongoing projects on Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Desktop; adding them to the Ubuntu UI Toolkit.

It became clear early on that focussing on individual components was only one part of the UI Toolkit. Ideally we also needed to redesign the actual software development tools to improve the user experience of already existing app developers and to attract new ones. To meet the fixed deadline of the first Ubuntu Touch release to manufacturers, the team decided to prioritise improving end user facing individual components and building blocks.

My team and I faced the challenge to deliver and constantly update an upgraded, refined and fully redesigned set of components, capable to support a fully convergent OS. Convergent means that components have the capability running across mobile, tablet and desktop. This work contributed significantly to improve the overall UX on the platform for Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Desktop.

Make it Ubuntu

THE APPROACH

The team began with taking stock, a big review of already excising components and its capabilities. User testing reports and consecutive developers feedback from 2013 Ubuntu Touch release helped us to understand issues not just with individual applications but also uncovered similar problems across them. We realised that many UX problems were caused by how individual components behaved and not necessarily how applications were designed. The conclusion was that most components were not supporting features as expected by users and that we could make significant improvements by rethinking and redesigning individual and joint component behaviour.

UBUNTU phone design specification example

Consequently the review revealed inconsistencies across components and insufficient documentation.

Mobile versions of Ubuntu UI Toolkit Gallery

1/1

In short, regardless how good a singular component is designed and how great the micro interaction is, if it doesn't fit into the whole system then the UX will feel odd.

To achieve a flexible component library I worked very close with developers who were devoted purley to component development. Eventually more designers dedicated some of their time to component design. This way me and the team were able to design, test, iterate and implement faster. After months of work, testing, failures and redesigns we created a working system across mobile, tablet and desktop which was then published on the Ubuntu site as part of the Ubuntu design guidelines. As Canonical, the company behind Ubunu, decided to discontinued the new OS the publishings were removed.