The art of patience

or Why bother
teaching Git to a designer

Interaction design

Like industrial design, the discipline (...) would start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product or service

Bill Mogridge, Designing Interactions (2007:14)

Building software that makes sense to the people who use it

I want you to teach Git to the designers working with you

A story in 3 parts

How
Why
How long

1. How?

The Yocto Project provides a set of tools for creating and maintaining customised Linux distributions for embedded devices, between them a build system.

Some interesting takeaways

Teach on a need to know basis
Avoid the Git jargon
Don't bother too much with the concepts
Do things with - never for - your designers
Designers should take notes and keep a cheat sheet
Teach command-line Git

git clone [SPECIAL_PLACE]

git checkout [BRANCH_THINGHY]

Some interesting takeaways

Teach on a need to know basis
Avoid the Git jargon
Don't bother too much with the concepts
Do things with - never for - your designers
Designers should take notes and keep a cheat sheet
Teach command-line Git

git pull

git fetch

Some interesting takeaways

Teach on a need to know basis
Avoid the Git jargon
Don't bother too much with the concepts
Do things with - never for - your designers
Designers should take notes and keep a cheat sheet
Teach command-line Git

git checkout -b [NEW_BRANCH]

git add [FILES]

git commit -s

git branch -d [BRANCH]

git branch -D [BRANCH]

git push --delete [REMOTE] [BRANCH]

git commit --amend

git push [REMOTE] [BRANCH]

Some interesting takeaways

Teach on a need to know basis
Avoid the Git jargon
Don't bother too much with the concepts
Do things with - never for - your designers
Designers should take notes and keep a cheat sheet
Teach command-line Git

A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand (...) A mental model is based on belief, not facts: that is, it's a model of what users know (or think they know) about a system

Jakob Nielsen, Mental Models (2010)

In case of a mental-model mismatch (...) make the system conform to users' mental models

Jakob Nielsen, Mental Models (2010)

Some interesting takeaways

Teach on a need to know basis
Avoid the Git jargon
Don't bother too much with the concepts
Do things with - never for - your designers
Designers should take notes and keep a cheat sheet
Teach command-line Git

2. Why?

lurking behind the demand for designers to code is the more pertinent and useful question of whether or not designers should understand the strong forces that the coder has to wrestle with. My answer to that is an unequivocal “Yes!”

Alan Cooper, Should Designers Code?? No, Part Two: Know Versus Do. (2017)