Re: [Usability] Context for Evo 2 Mockups.

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 21:56, Anna Marie Dirks wrote:

> So. Hopefully this is what Calum was asking for, since I just spent a
> heck of a long time writing up all of this. Calum, if this is NOT what
> you had in mind, please let me know specifically what other kind of
> data you want.

BTW, I followed up with Anna off-list about this since my reply was too
rambling and full of random off-topic junk to bother the list with :) 
But it was along the lines of "yes, all this information is definitely
part of what we want, but perhaps it would be useful to produce
something a bit more graphical as well".  E.g. something like
http://www.softera.com/w_papers/objects.htm, or the
over-simplified model I talked about at GUADEC:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/articles/guadec-2003/guadec-paper_html_m448a52dd.png.  
These are often good ways of summarising what all the user-visible
objects are and how they should interact with each other.  And, not
infrequently, at making you baulk in horror when you try to draw it and
realise how horribly tangled your model really is :)

> I would be most appreciative of any specific, concrete ideas about how
> we might improve the usability of this design.

As I also said to Anna, I'm not completely sure how making this sort of
info available will pan out, it's just kind of an experiment based on my
suggestion that it might be worthwhile for the GUP to get involved in
helping to review UI design docs like this (eventually with the aid of
some personas and per-app scenarios), rather than just commenting on
people's button spacings and suchlike :)  

The Evo redesign happens to be the first project that's come along at a
suitable state of development since then... maybe it's really too big to
use as an testbed until we really know what we want to do and how, but
hey, it's worth a shot, right?

Cheeri,
Calum.


-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems