Re: User interface improvements

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Nat Pryce <np2@doc.ic.ac.uk> writes:
> There's a discussion on the comp.human-factors newsgroup
> about the (poor) human factors issues of Open Source
> user interfaces, including GNOME.  HF experts complain
> that it is difficult to contribute to an OS project
> unless a contribution is in the form of code.  Perhaps
> the GNOME or Gnome developer site should include a
> prominent link to the Gnome User Interface Improvement
> Project pages to encourage feedback from this useful
> community.
>

Good point. Please, feel free to post a link to the newsgroup and
encourage them to contribute.

Judging by gnome-gui-list though, often these guys get frustrated too
quickly - a UI expert that really helps the open source community will
probably have to be constantly working for small, incremental changes,
because that's how open source software (usually) develops.  There are
some exceptions though, when commercial companies throw a lot of
resources at a problem. Also, a UI expert would have to ignore a lot
of stupid flamage from non-UI-experts-who-think-they-are to get
anywhere. James Cape seems to be pretty good at this.

The other issue is that most UI people spend lots of time testing
things in UI labs, and we don't have access to such a thing...

Havoc