Re: UI Guidelines -- What I'm doing

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 04:34:06PM -0700, Seth Nickell wrote:
>> underdeveloped, and might be plain wrong in many respects. I'd like to see
>> the UI guidelines be pretty definitive and not change a huge amount after a
>> 1.0 release.
 
> Given the experience (or lack thereof) we have working on UI guidelines,
> and usability in general, it does not seem reasonable to expect we will
> "get it right" or anywhere in that ballpark for 1.0. Microsoft took a
> *long time* to develop good guidelines, and that is with some reasonably
> experience people. Unless we can import more talent I suspect that its
> going to take many many waves of user testing and rewrites before we can
> become as static as systems like MacOS have been.

Of course. We are also, of course, in a somewhat different position than the
authors of the MacOS guidelines: We have a large base of software already
written, and at least part of the UI guidelines work will probably be to
analyze and codify The Way Things Are Done In GNOME (in cases where the
guidelines saying it should be done differently will offer no substantial
improvements and/or will be to fight an uphill battle with the ingrained
existing standards).


> I think we should go into this knowing the guidelines will need to be
> completely rewritten post-1.0. Having some guidelines is better than
> none, and will improve the state of UI affairs (hopefully) for GNOME 2.x
> releases (probably not 2.0, but hopefully revisions). During that time
> we will learn what we did wrong and revise, and hopefully GNOME 3.0 will
> be based on much better guidelines.

I think completely rewritten is being very pessimistic. We're standing on
the shoulders of giants in many ways: We have the Apple Human Interface
Guidelines, as well as other documents, to support ourselves when we do
this. But yes, significant changes will probably happen after the "finished"
release, however I think we shouldn't rush to declare something "finished"
with the mindset that we can always fix it later, it will be completely
rewritten, etc. That's the way to sloppiness.

-- 
   Joakim Ziegler - Ximian Web Monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
 FIX sysop - Free Software Coder - Writer - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
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