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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Why would a UX designer be involved in any way, shape, or form in kernel level code patches? They would literally never ship an update if they had that many hands in the pot for something completely unrelated. Should they also have their sales reps and marketing folks pre-brief before they make any code changes?

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A UX designer might have told them it was a bad idea to deploy the patch widely without testing a smaller cohort, for instance. That’s an obvious measure that they skipped this time.

But that doesn't have anything to do with what UX designers typically do

I can't believe people on HN are posting this stuff over and over again. Either you are holistically disconnected from what proper software development should look like or outright creating the same environments that resulted in the crowdstrike issue.

Software security and quality is the responsibility of everyone on the team. A good UX designer should be thinking of ways a user can escape the typical flow or operate in unintended ways and express that to testers. And in decisions where management is forcing untested patches everyone should chime in.

Not true; UX designers typically are responsible for advocating for a robust, intuitive experience for users. The fact that kernel updates don’t have a user interface doesn’t make them exempt from asking the simple question: how will this affect users? And the subsequent question: is there a chance that deploying this eviscerates the user experience?

Granted, a company that isn’t focused on the user experience as much as it is on other things might not prioritise this as much in the first place.

the person you're replying will not take any sane argument once they decided that UX must be involved in kernel technical decision...

How would it not be related? Jamming untested code down the pipe with no way for users to configure when it's deployed and then rendering their machines inoperable is an extremely bad user experience and I would absolutely expect a UX expert to step in to try to avoid that.

Pick any large company that has a division working on Linux kernel (say Android).

I bet my ass UX is not anywhere close to the low-level OS team.

UX is definitely embedded in the App level team but not in low-level.

Pfft, I never said that at all. I’m not talking about technical decisions. OP was talking about QC, which is verifying software for human use. If you don’t have user-centered people involved (UX or product or proserve) then you end up with user-hostile decisions like these people made.

I would agree if it was a UI designer, but a good UX designer designs for the users, which in this case including the system admins who will be updating kernel level code patches. Ensuring they have a good experience e.g no crashes, is their job. A recommendation would likely be for example small roll-outs to minimise the number of people having a bad user experience on a roll-out that goes wrong.

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