Re: [Usability]List policy, usability leadership, mission statement [Was: "widget"]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 10:33, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes: 
> > Now where this all goes south is when said team needs to interact more
> > with the world.... Our "organization crisis" is mostly an external
> > problem than an internal problem right now. So what we *most* need to do
> > is not "establish clear leadership" but establish clear channels by
> > which we communicate group consensus, findings, decisions, whatever.
> > 
> 
> 1. HIG
> 2. bugzilla bugs about HIG noncompliance
> 
> Doesn't that cover it?

No. That's a major fallacy. The HIG (even a very complete HIG) is like a
scratch in the surface of design and usability.  Its possible (and even
highly likely) for GNOME apps to be 100% HIG compliant (even a future
HIG that's 4 times as complete) and still be lame ducks.

Design is not an engineering discipline, it is an art. The HIG extends
this to a concrete set of rules whenever possible, but this is possible
in a minority of cases not the majority.

The HIG allows the "low hanging fruit" to be dealt with without so much
hands on maintenance from usability people, and since there aren't many
of us and there are a lot of people interested in using such a tool its
a great use of our time (which is why its a priority right now).
Practically speaking, I've also found that many people listen to the HIG
when they won't listen to me. This is frustrating as hell, but I guess
it demonstrates the power of the published word. So every item we can
cover in the HIG is another item we don't have to argue to death with a
hundred hackers.

-Seth