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#2. The project & you
To work on the usability of a project you don’t need specific usability expertise – just the passion to learn and apply it. This is well described in the UX Advocate program started by David Siegel of Canonical and promoted by Allan Day of GNOME. Although it unfortunately didn’t gain enough traction, the motivations behind it are very true: To be a UX Advocate, you don’t need to be able to create pixel-perfect mockups in Inkscape or have an HCI degree. All you need is love – you have to love an open source project and the people who use it, and you need to be patient, persistent, and persuasive. Of course, if you have some background in user experience, that would be tremendously helpful, but it’s unnecessary; it’s far better for an open source project to have a novice UX Advocate than none at all. Siegel (2010) A UX Advocate doesn’t need to be a developer. They don’t even need to be a usability expert (though they can be on their way to becoming one). What they do need is the time, energy, and inclination to champion user experience. A UX Advocate can triage and prioritize UX bugs, and they can research design problems. They can even do user testing. Day (2010) This document is exactly for making that as easy as possible.