Re: Usability list? Eh?

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

colin z robertson wrote:

> I am now. Thanks, Calum, for letting me know about this. But what the
> hell's going on? What's wrong with the gnome-gui list?

Well, all of what follows is just my personal and humble opinion... 

For one thing, many of the people who are involved with GNOME usability
in a big way day-to-day don't hang out on gnome-gui-list any more, and
haven't done for a long time.  I can't speak for them and tell you what
their reasons are, because obviously I still do hang out here, and so do
any of you who are reading this  :o)  Nor can I really guess whether
having a new 'usability' list will make things any better or worse.  

Either way, at GUADEC it was generally felt that for historical reasons
(rather than any lack of effort from the current list members),
gnome-gui-list was poorly-regarded in the community and wasn't really
doing as good a job as it could be.

So, my take on the new list is that it's been set up to try and
eradicate some of the negative historical baggage that g-g-l has,
hopefully get everyone back on board who should be involved in writing
guidelines etc., and get things moving faster and in a more organised
fashion than they have been up until now.

There's also a fairly good argument that usability is about much more
than just designing GUIs, so having a list called "usability" rather
than "gui-list" might encourage people to think about the whole concept
of usability a bit more.  But maybe that's just a pipe dream :o)

On a similar note, a new usability website has also been set up at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup, which will in time (with James
Cape's permission) replace the old GNOME UI Improvement Pages (but
retaining/copying over any useful stuff).  I have to admit I was partly
responsible for this, as I was looking for somewhere to put my slides
and stuff from my GUADEC usability testing presentation :o)   I
approached James to see whether he thought the UI Improvement Pages
would be a good place to put them, or whether it would be better to try
and get something new and better off the ground.  And we ended up
plumping for the latter, with buy-in from a few other interested parties
as well.

> If people want to start up a project to revive the UI Guidelines then
> that's great. As I've said before, I can't put as much time into it as
> it deserves and it would take me a hell of a long time to finish it on
> my own.

This is very true... all the platform guidelines you'll see for Mac,
Windows, SGI, Java etc. have taken many person years to complete.

> So why is there suddenly a new mailing list and a new UI Guidelines
> project? What was wrong with the old ones?

See above  :o)  Summary: nothing was/is inherently wrong with them, I
think something just had to be done to get people motivated and
interested in it again.  Whether or not new lists/websites/IRC channels
will help remains to be seen, I guess, but it seemed to be a fairly
popular course of action amongst the people at GUADEC who expressed an
interest.

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems