OnlyDust is accelerating the pace of open source innovation by removing barriers for developers and projects alike, simplifying onboarding, tracking impact, and rewarding meaningful work. We joined OnlyDust in early 2025 as their ongoing design team, helping sharpen their product experience and put a greater focus on project discovery and Developer Experience.

Chapter 1: Problem Solving

There's a steep learning curve when contributing to an OS project for the first time, so by highlighting simpler projects and issues which developers could begin with, we maximize our chances of devs making a contribution that's successfully merged into the project.

We briefly explored the idea of grouping issues by level and limiting access to each depending on how many successful merges you'd completed, however we ultimately decided that accurately predicting what level each issue should live in (even with AI) would be easier said than done, so decided to hold this for later. These scrappy, lo-fi mocks let us quickly explore ideas like these and knock them on the head if we decide they don't have legs.

Chapter 2: Improving Project Discovery

We opted for a more traditional 'Discover' experience inspired by news websites, the App Store, and online marketplaces, where items are served up in different collections. These collections can be swapped out and rotated dynamically based on user attributes or seasonally, which avoids the main page becoming stale over time.

Chapter 3 & Beyond