Team

About us

Hi, Oi, Hola 👋

Our mission is to make Tor usable for everyone by promoting the principles of human-centered design throughout the Tor Project, and the wider community too. Though small, we're a full-stack design team encompassing the following disciplines:

User experience (UX) and product design
Ethical user research
Brand design

We hold weekly meetings to share what we're working on and plan our tasks for the coming week every Monday at 1600 UTC. Guests with an interest in the usability of censorship-circumvention and privacy preserving technology are always welcome. If you'd like to join, please reach out via one of the communication methods listed below.

Team members

The UX Team includes volunteers from across the globe who collaborate with the following core contributors:

name	role	email	IRC
Duncan	UX Team Lead	duncan at torproject dot org	donuts
Nico	Brand Designer	nicob at torproject dot org	nicob
Priscila	Product Designer	felicia at torproject dot org	catladyfelicia
Sajolida	Product Designer	sajolida at torproject dot org	sajolida
Bella	Project Manager	bella at torproject dot org	bellatchau
You?	User Research Coordinator	Apply now!

If you'd like to contribute to open user research at the Tor Project, please see our checklist for new volunteers, review the issues marked First Contribution, and prepare a research proposal that responds to one of these issues.

How to reach us

Text-based chat

UX Team members are active in the #tor-ux IRC channel on the OFTC network, and the equivalent matrix channel #tor-ux:matrix.org, on weekdays from around 1400–2200 UTC. However, please keep any discussion on these channels on-topic, and see #tor for general user support instead.

Email

We can be reached privately via the email alias ux-team at torproject dot org.

On the forum

We're also active on the Tor Project forum. Although there isn't a dedicated section for the UX Team, we typically monitor and reply to posts in the Tor Browser Feedback, Tor Browser Alpha Feedback and Website Feedback sections, alongside recent Tor Browser release posts within the News section.

Current priorities

For the next year, our priorities are to:

Support the design and development of the Tor VPN.
Release Tor Browser 13.5 and 14.0 featuring product improvements based on empirical research.
Design and ship new features to Android in parallel with desktop.
Conduct qualitative, community-focused user research in China, Latin America and East Africa.
Improve developer hand-off, standardize our development cycles and document our design/development methodology.
Update and expand our product design libraries and tooling.
Refresh the Tor brand and release an updated style guide.
Continue to boost fundraising, outreach and communications efforts with good design.

Our projects

Here's what we're working on right now:

Project 101 – Tor VPN Client for Android
Project 131 – Ongoing Maintenance (Mullvad and Tor Browser)
Project 163 – Community and Usability Intervention in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in the Global South
Project 165 – FOSS Sustainability Fund
Project 167 – 2024 ESR Transition
Unsponsored – Redesign donate.torproject.org

Useful links

Project management

UX Kanban: Tracks all issues that impact Tor's user experience across the organization.
Team Kanban: Tracks the issues currently assigned to the UX Team (including upcoming tasks).
UX Team Roadmap: An overview of the team's quarterly roadmap and priorities.
UX Repository: Home to all the UX-related tickets and public files that don't belong in a specific repo.