Re: direction [Re: slab menu]

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

El mar, 06-02-2007 a las 12:56 -0500, Dan Winship escribi�> Possible solutions:
>      1. Convince Novell that its current "sell to big companies"
>         business plan is foolish, and there's much more money to be made
>         in selling software to teenagers
>      2. Stop accepting contributions to GNOME from Novell
>      3. Add mandatory pornographic desktop wallpapers to the release, to
>         pull GNOME in the opposite direction from "corporate desktop"
>      4. Give up on the idea of there being One True GNOME and one
>         Desktop release for everyone, and instead let
>         packagers/distributors decide what pieces (slab
>         +control-center-shell / old main menu+control center menu items)
>         will work best for their users

5. Do real interaction design, instead of just post-facto usability
testing. [Alan Cooper, pp. 204]

We've been doing a *lot* of user testing, but not much interaction
design.  We haven't looked at people's workflows at all.  As a result,
we have pretty good usability for atomic operations like "launch the
word processor" or "send a mail", but not for real work composed of many
little parts and interactions.

- Write a business plan and a budget with 5 other people.  You'll find
all the problems with sending emails with attachments, knowing where you
put things, seeing how people organize the multitude of files they need
to put a project together, see how they get distracted when Gaim pops up
7 windows simultaneously, etc.

- Make a brochure to advertise handmade crafts.  You'll find all the
problems in taking pictures and color-correcting them and resizing them,
and then inserting them into OpenOffice, and OOo's usability problems
when making layouts or tables or when it changes the font at whim.

- Write a book.  How do people organize chapters/sections/etc., how
ridiculously hard it is to use styles in OpenOffice, how you organize
your images, how you track changes, report progress, etc.  See how
obscenely hard it is to include a landscape page for a diagram in a book
whose pages are in portrait orientation.

  Federico