All right, so now we have
get in light and they build a bare visualization tool, but they can design it.
I feel there's a happy ending so I hope you can give us a happy ending.
Yes, I hope so.
Hello.
So, as you can imagine, it's kind of, I imagine, classic story about experience,
top and source developers building the tools I want, and how a skill designer
clean their mess.
So, I'm Alexis and this is Arthur.
Arthur, sorry.
And I'll start with a bit of context about defy light.
So, defy light is about visualizing graphs.
Sorry, hard work to say.
Let's go back to 20.06.
At this point, some researchers need to render network somehow, and there's some softwares
that the load doing it, but they don't scale well, and they're hard to use.
And there are very more about graph simulations, softwares.
And at some point, a team of people wanting to map the parts of the web.
So, they crawled spaces of the web.
They retrieved the dataset, and they wanted to edit maps of the parts of the web.
And the thing is, the previous softwares made it very, very hard to do.
So, what they wanted to do basically is, first of all, you have to put the nodes at proper places.
So, you want to use an algorithm that will create a layout for the nodes of the graph,
so that nodes are closer in the image when they are closer on the web,
which means either a short steps to go from one to the other website through iPod Textings,
or common neighbors or this kind of things,
and nodes that are afar on the image should be afar on the network.
This is one of the first issues to solve.
Then, they would like ideally this software to actually allow choosing how to map different graphic variables.
So, nodes could have, for instance, a color,
a color that could correspond to some ID that is present on this website, or to some language, or anything.
And then, the size of the nodes is the criteria.
So, they built JIFI.
So, JIFI is an open source Java desktop application,
and that does exactly what I said earlier.
So, basically, they presented it at the time as a Photoshop for Graph,
and it was really a software to create images of network datasets.
First of all, one, the 2010s, the thing is HTML5, new JavaScript, new new capabilities in the web,
so we actually want to get something better than just an image,
and we develop within and around the JIFI community,
a set of tools that allow us to actually run their graphs on web applications.
So, basically, no, we can create the graph images in web pages.
So, we even discussed in 2019 at first them,
could we actually move JIFI to the web?
And the thing is, during all those years, we actually did it multiple times.
So, all those screenshots are different tools, developed by different people,
but all more or less connected to the JIFI community.
At some point, we were kind of friends and people knowing each other,
spending times on kind of concurrent applications, developing the same things again and again,
and we all sat around the table and said, okay,
could JIFI maybe endorse one of those projects,
so that we actually have an official version on the web for JIFI.
So, 2022 comes and we build JIFI light.
A bit more context here is that I think is important,
especially for the happy ending.
I am Alexis, I work at the firm named Westware,
and we are lucky enough to actually have money and time.
So, we actually could take the deflight project and port it.
So, we spend a week, all of the few of us together,
once twice, three times a year to actually make progress on JIFI light.
Next week is tomorrow and I'm very happy.
So, it's nice because we are in early 2025,
we made the software we want, we are happy, we use it,
it's as fast as we want it.
There's some things that are not exactly as we want,
like to buttons are not perfect.
We have two bad icons and the free of us always clicked on the wrong one first,
but we don't care, it's soft software.
I mean, that's not what's going to stop other people to use it, right?
And at some point, it is.
So, we meet people we know,
and we know they use JIFI for 15 years,
but they don't know about JIFI light.
So, this is a bad sign for us.
Also, all those tiny things we lived with,
they accumulate and we have no idea how to actually solve them
because it's like a huge pile of little things,
left by a thousand paper gets, you know.
And we have no feedback,
we actually have no idea how people use JIFI light.
And it's not really as beautiful as it would like it to be.
And we are a bit sad.
But fortunately, we see on Master Dome,
there's a designer who's looking for internships for his students,
and we say, yeah, we have design needs, probably.
And we meet with him and later on,
we have a meeting with Artio,
who comes join us, first work on some industrial projects we have,
and then tackle the mess.
Okay, can you hear me well?
Yeah.
So, Alexi, just showed you the story of visual network analysis,
that I was student in design,
and I wasn't a part of the scientific communities
that uses graphs.
So, there was a gap between my knowledge of design
and the knowledge of visual network analysis
that the team at Westward had.
And we needed to start to redesign JIFI light
to show them that gap.
So, the team asked at Westward,
they are three developers,
asked me first to do some interview of them.
At first, I was very surprised.
I'm used to make a user interview,
but not to interview my own developers.
And I was a bit surprised,
because I didn't really know
how to use these results as a value UX-wise.
And so, with a smaller research,
I discovered that this practice has a name,
and it's called a stakeholder interviews.
It's a really good way to tackle a project of this size
by defining the scope of the project.
So, I wrote some questions that in a four-part interview,
and interviewed each member of Westward,
it was alone with me,
taking notes as asked questions.
So, I asked questions about themselves.
That was interesting,
because as they were talking about their motivation,
and what's why the project was important for them,
they were also doing me a quick course on visual network analysis,
and on the needs JIFI light was built on.
Afterwards, I asked them what was JIFI light,
and who was using JIFI light and the response,
they gave me is that they didn't know,
and that it was very hard to like,
to know this fact for them,
they didn't have the tool to ask the community,
and I asked why I was in this project,
and why to help them verbalize the needs,
they saw.
After this interviews,
I used a process of affinity mapping to sort the data,
and I make the team of Westward vote for the,
the way they wanted to improve the projects.
They had like two key choice.
They wanted first to improve JIFI light usability,
rather than adding new features,
because it was a question they asked themselves,
was the problem of JIFI light due to lack of key features,
and there was another thing that I talked about before,
they didn't use people using software,
and they wanted to know about it.
So in a few weeks,
two weeks, I made some quick users to this.
We don't have a lot of resources to make this to this,
so I was alone again,
asking questions as I was taking note,
but this time with people for like one hour and a half,
so it was a long interviews,
and it was like,
there was a bit bias,
but we need to accept this to move forward.
What I can say is that being alone,
taking note, which is not a very common in user interview,
help me create silence in the interview
that the users were using to talk more and talk more freely.
So this is very interesting.
So here is a quick example of questions I was asking them.
So there was an interview and a test,
each lasting 45 minutes,
and here are the results we found,
we found like two key insights with this study,
first that navigation and menus were a big problem in JIFI,
for example,
the first thing user were doing when they opened JIFI,
was using the last button in the menu,
so it was a very direct place,
and we found that after one.
And as you can see,
there was also a big asymmetry between the two menus.
And the other insight was that a lot of people using JIFI,
and not JIFI light,
were lacking what JIFI calls the data laboratory,
which is a big table of all the data on nods and edges,
and say, use it to first know the graphs they're working on,
and also to correct the data while they are exploring,
which you are using,
there are nods.
And so that was a real thing that JIFI light,
lacked.
So with this insight,
we started designing for three weeks.
First things, as I said,
I changed the menus of JIFI light.
So we used a pattern that we found on JIFI light,
to create like menus on over,
because as you can see,
there's a lot of indoor menus.
And so they needed,
user needed to access this sub menu really fast,
and it worked well.
And one thing I can stress enough is
all sharing my wireframes,
even if they were unfinished,
was I have been really important to move forward designing.
I'm a stiller student as you heard.
I have, I had like the frameworks
that to share my tool to the developers,
I need to be at the state of mockups.
But here, I wasn't an expert in,
in other languages, etc.
And I really needed the advice of Alexey
and all the team at Westwear.
While I was working on wireframes,
and they have been really, really cool tools
to create a discussion and to find a problematics.
And really fast,
these project help us finding solutions
that were unexpected,
and which are proper to JIFI light,
which have a lot of menus.
And so we need to,
we need it to make them a quality,
so it worked well.
And I worked on a new visual identity
and my goals was to make the graphs
like the centerpiece of JIFI light.
So tune down all the menus
at the side for the graphs
to express themselves.
And after what we spent on a week
to implement the designs,
I was doing with the team in Westwear,
like a small design system,
inside of the files,
while my design were implemented.
And at this time again,
collaborating with them at the same time
was very important.
For example, I used for my naming,
a lot of sized label,
like MD, Bouton, MD, etc.
And for them,
it's tight to break points
because they are using a lot of bootstraps.
And so there was confusion like this,
that's working together
to correct confusion.
So working on an expert tools
is kind of odd.
And when the user interview
are ended at some point,
talking to my team and my developers,
which are better experts
about these subjects and me,
helped a lot.
And yeah, I want to emphasize
that it starts with stakeholder interviews
that within the,
you while creating wireframes,
it's been very, very important to discuss with my team
to use them not as final project
but as a way to exchange with them.
Yeah, and it's going to be quick.
We, oh, thank you.
Yeah, we,
we only invested,
invested time around development time
in this kind of urban software.
It's a very first time
in the Polybonoi and I from Westwell,
invested money actually hiring someone
to help us do what we count
and we are very happy
because the device is really awesome now
and we have lots of good feedbacks
and we see that now people use it
as it was supposed to work.
Things do work and so we invested more
now we have a proper documentation
with fixed communication issues
and yeah,
I think it's really worth investing
in design when we do open source
basically.
Thank you very much.
Oh.
Nice.
Yeah.
You said you had a different name
context to the developer and design
and how did you solve that?
Yeah.
So yes,
we had different conventions between
the design system from Artur
and Woodstrap that we used
that is was our
de facto design system.
We solved it by forcing Artur
to move to the Woodstrap naming convention.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
So when you're working with expert users
and you're using the software a lot,
do you find that they keep referencing
other solutions they used in the past
for the same kinds of tasks?
And how do you avoid just copying
them and taking a good mix?
Just before I replay
it before I repeat.
Are you asking to Artur
while he's doing his user interviews
or as modernary?
A bit of a book, but particularly around
the user interviews.
Okay.
So the question is
did the expert users
we've been discussing with
all of them refer to other applications
for the tasks they do within the device.
And you want to answer?
Yeah.
Well, they refer to a lot to Jiffy
and it's a core fact in this project.
But Jiffy was
it's like this.
Well, it's all the image or no, it's like this.
Yeah, it's like this.
So,
where I couldn't really take
some inspiration of Jiffy
which have already a lot of information
of a lot.
So, we found inspiration
as well.
And I think it's good to not copy past things
but to discuss them
and then inspired by some projects
in itself, I think really good.
And I think it's a matter of discussing
with the team to find solutions that's worked.
I don't want to go off topic,
but I have the feeling that the
do-grad visualization is a very tough,
size, that's also connected to the visualization.
And the ability to explain a complex data
with graphs.
And what I found frustrating
is sometimes students or researchers
have a dataset and whatever they do,
they do self-figure,
they believe that they self-figure
as a meaning, but it doesn't.
Yeah.
And you are also the best entry point to teach
about these.
Because sometimes they are making a complex graph
that looks at a lot of wonderful,
but they perhaps are table
or we'll be even better to explain that.
And then believe that you are the only one
more entitled to explain
and why do you use them when to don't?
Okay.
So, you were stating that
one of the big issues with Jiffy
and Jiffy Light is that people produce big images
and they think they see insights in them
that actually don't exist.
And I think you're right.
If you want to know more about this
this read about visual network and analysis
that actually says exactly what people read
in these images, that's a right image.
That's kind of a sub-field of graph visualization.
And I think there's the worst people
to address this issue.
Because you produce the software.
I think users should help themselves
try to find how to actually get
active-able insights,
good signals in their images
and try to eliminate
what signals that are actually pure bias basically.
That I still think that Jiffy Light
has a software, have a key role, not a key role.
But I have a role in all
that are at least analyzed
afterwards.
Because, for example, in Jiffy Light
to space, not, it takes a little time
and it's not an algorithm that's a tadar.
You learn the algorithm and you are seeing
not moving slowly.
And this fact implies that
there's not a good image.
You need to stop the algorithm at some point.
But there's not a good state of the graph.
There's not a true answer.
And I think it's important.
And in Jiffy Light, like,
shaped this perception.
Yes?
I'm not sure how much control you have over Jiffy
Jiffy.
But are you flying to try to implement
some of the good patterns and ideas
from the Jiffy Light redesign
into the Jiffy desktop?
That's a very good question.
So the question is will
there are things in Jiffy Light
I don't exist in Jiffy yet
and will this thing be plotted in the future?
Right.
It's not about control.
We don't have any control about what happens in Jiffy,
but we have common events
where we meet all together and we discuss both
roadmap, basically.
And right now Jiffy is all about
migrating to the new rendering and jinn
and hopefully release a V1 at some point.
And there are some ideas from Jiffy Light
that they want to take already,
like captions.
But it's not actually planned yet.
The TS at some point,
they would like to implement
the good things from Jiffy Light.
Okay. Sorry.
Thank you very much.