Where designers fail at open source.

This was too good not to pass along: following a serous article at Open source needs designers, some wag posted the following story as a comment:

Developer: Hi Designer! We’re really glad you decided to join our project. We could really use a kick ass UI because we all suck hippo ass at design.

Designer: Thanks! I’m looking forward to helping out. I have some really great ideas for the project.

Developer: Thats awesome Designer. I’ve got you an svn account setup. fred/23rSD@#$SDRsdfEasd5323. Go ahead and check out the source.

Designer: Where do I check out the source?

Developer: svn://open-source-project-x.com/svn/trunk/

Designer: Cool, thanks!

[10 minutes later…]

Designer: Uhh…I don’t see anything at that url.

Developer: ???

Designer: When I go to that url, I don’t see anything. Safari just gives me a message saying it can’t open that url or something.

Developer: Haha! Your not supposed to ‘check out’ the source as in ‘view’, your supposed to run that command from the command line. svn co svn://open-source-project-x.com/svn/trunk

Designer: Oh! Sorry, never done this before. So just type that in…Terminal I suppose?

Developer: yeah.

[10 minutes later]

Designer: Man, I’m just having bad luck or something. When I type that command in I get the message: -bash: svn: command not found.

Developer: You’ve got to have svn installed. Have you installed it yet?

Designer: No, where do I get it?

Developer: Just run sudo port install svn

Designer: sudo port install WTF?

Developer: Do you have Darwin ports installed?

Designer: I don’t think so? What’s that?

Developer: Grab it from here (insert url here).

[Two hours later]

Designer: Ok, I’ve managed to get Darwin ports installed and I’ve checked out the source. Finally!

Developer: Awesome! You should be able to rock and roll now.

Designer: Great, going to check it out now (as in view).

[30 minutes later]

Designer: Developer, you know I think we should really change the way feature-x is implemented. It’s just not that intuitive. From a users perspective, we should probably implement it like …[insert well founded design decision]…

Developer: Hmm… I don’t know. I think it’s fine the way it is. Besides, it would take forever to implement it the way you think it should be. We’d have to change to much stuff.

Designer: Hmm…….OK.

Developer: So, think you can make this look like a really awesome app?

THE END