Re: [Usability] GNOME 3 Usability Hackfest

[Karl Lattimer <karl qdh org uk>]

On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 14:15 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote: 
> On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 10:35 +0000, Charline wrote:
> > > I would appreciate it if everybody who is planning on attending the
> > > GNOME 3 Usability Hackfest could speak up and share their ideas of
> > what
> > > we should focus on while together, and what things each person plans
> > to
> > > bring to the event or work on. 

I recently added empathy to my list of things to take a look at during
this hackfest. 

I also have some notes and ideas I want to introduce wrt overall user
experience in the shell.

I wanted to take a look at combobox (and possibly other) menus in GTK+
which cause horrible problems at screen edges, and also look at
inconsistencies between combo entries and comboboxes which appear to
have no logical (code or usability) reason to look different when
expanded. 

Nautilus is also something we should take a look at, there have been a
few general improvement posts to planet gnome and we should start
considering them seriously. Personally I liked Garrett's mockups and he
mentioned to me he was also looking to add more to them.

There are some other issues I'd like to discuss more generally, one of
which is the GNOME first impressions, a short introductory video of
GNOME for first time users could be added, a request to fill out the
"About Me" dialog on first login and a link-tastic set of bookmarks to
get the user started. Things like that to make the first impression of
GNOME a "consumer" experience rather than an engineering one... "Here
you go, now get on with it" isn't really a user-friendly approach to a
desktop environment which will be mostly unfamiliar to new users. 

We could also make a start at how a pattern library for user interaction
and experience could be implemented on GNOME's infrastructure and
generate some initial mockups. Something which is in the same vein as
"python snippets" jono's been banging on about would be a good idea from
a UI/UX perspective.

... that's all I can say is in my head right now

BR,
K