UX Research & Design

Over the course of 2020, the pip team has been working on improving pip’s user experience.

Currently, our focus is on:

  1. Understanding who uses pip

  2. Understanding how pip compares to other package managers, and how pip supports other Python packaging tools

  3. Understanding how pip’s functionality is used, and how it could be improved

  4. Understanding how pip’s documentation is used, and how it could be improved

You can read the overall plan and the mid-year update to learn more about our work.

How to contribute

Participate in UX research

It is important that we hear from pip users so that we can:

  • Understand how pip is currently used by the Python community

  • Understand how pip users need pip to behave

  • Understand how pip users would like pip to behave

  • Understand pip’s strengths and shortcomings

  • Make useful design recommendations for improving pip

If you are interested in participating in pip user research, please join pip’s user panel. You can read more information about the user panel here.

We are also looking for users to:

Report UX issues

If you believe that you have found a user experience bug in pip, or you have ideas for how pip could be made better for all users, you please file an issue on the pip issue tracker.

Work on UX issues

You can help improve pip’s user experience by working on UX issues. Issues that are ideal for new contributors are marked with “good first issue”.

Test new features

You can help the team by testing new features as they are released to the community. Currently, we are looking for users to test pip’s new dependency resolver.

Next steps

In the coming months we will extend this documentation to include:

  1. Summaries of our user research, including recommendations for how to improve pip

  2. Tools for the pip team to continue to practice user centered design (e.g. user personas, etc.)