DEPRECIATED — Design Projects Backlog

Notes

No idea what the intent of this page was, when I created it. Issues are the standard for documenting needs; and increasingly, moving those from here and into the main SD repo.

Original document

Have an idea for something that could benefit from a proper design effort? Jot it down below, or create a project page for it and jot the link below! Please also follow the Problem/Solution/Need format, shown in the example... and include links to research if evidence exists to support a need or hypothesis.

Example

Create a GUI for Aaron and Kevin's DeadDrop idea
- Problem: Aaron and Kevin just created this awesome new system called DeadDrop to meet an important communication need for investigative journalists, but it's only accessible through a command-line interface.
- Solution: Create a GUI that would allow sources and journalists from a range of technical abilities, to use DeadDrop.
- Need: Sources put their personal safety and/or professional livelihood at risk by sharing sensitive material with Journalists. No system exists that can allow for communication reciprocity with total Source anonymity and privacy maintained, which makes reporting on high-impact stories almost impossible. Aaron and Kevin solved for the basic need, with DeadDrop. DeadDrop requires technical knowledge to use, however, that none of the users who'd benefit from it, have. Sources and Journalists aren't developers. They need a usable GUI to step them through the process, with content to guide them through making informed technical decisions to protect their identities.

Backlog Items

Create a standardized template for Newsroom Landing Pages; or ideally, FOP could host the content and Newsrooms would import strings onto pages hosted at their own URLs.
- Problem: News org landing pages are the starting point of each Source's experience using SecureDrop. As such they are the most important educational artifact in the SecureDrop ecosystem, for guiding Sources to make informed choices with securely sharing information. Nope, regular folks don't read "Documentation." This is the documentation, and it is problematic to impose upon customers the burden of educating users in how to use our product. Users lose by depending upon untested content, and newsrooms are burdened with a technical/usability challenge most are ill equipped to meet.
- Solution: Design a simple/standardized page layout with introductory and instructional content that gets iterated on through user testing, and through that process gets validated as meeting the highest possible standard for non-technical user OpSec awareness and basic use instruction for SecureDrop. Build and ship this page template with installation packages, so that it can easily live below any news org's masthead on an https page and can easily reflow across screen-sizes while using the website's grid, <body>, <h1> and <h2> styles.
- Need: News orgs today are responsible for coding/designing their own landing pages. Installing and onboarding a new SecureDrop system is a significant workload burden for news orgs. Many news orgs do not have UX resources of any kind, or they do but lack the bandwidth to test instructional content for comprehension and behavioral compliance of a single page unrelated to generating revenue.
  - Comprehension of instructional text is a usability problem. News orgs are unlikely put landing pages through the testing riggors for comprehension and behavioral compliance that Source safety depends on.
  - In newsroom interviews, it has been revealed that most smaller newsrooms just copy/paste content larger news orgs already created. This validates the hypothesis that owning the creation of this content is a burden most news orgs do not want or do not have the means to own.
  - 2018's Newsroom Workflkow research and Journalist Interviews both revealed the above realities, and provided evidentiary depth behind a previously hypothesized need. note: yet to link newsroom workflow synthesis outputs, or to highlight specific points of evidence in either report