Re: IRC channels in gnome development

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi,

Maciej Piechotka wrote:
> <FLAME>Then show <del>your<del><ins>design team</ins> work! All I'm
> hearing is that research have been done and the issue have been taken
> into consideration during disussion but I DON'T have any references. I
> cannot see logs of IRC (at least google is not showing them), blogs does
> not disclose why the decision was made in such way exactly and why the
> broken workflows are bad. All I'm hearing is that I'm uninformed.
> 
> The decision presented on blog is presented as final final - not as a
> strong proposal (even if technically it is the same there are slight
> differences in PR). I'm not specialist in UI design - but I cannot even
> get response to information why my workflow is bad and how did you
> invision it (say - large backups during night).</FLAME>

Even if you had records of every discussion, you wouldn't get the information you're looking for. Design decisions don't get made committee meeting style, and design involves a lot of specialist background knowledge which doesn't get explicitly referenced. Fact is, we'll probably never be able to give 100% of the rationale behind design decisions.

It simply isn't true to say that we haven't made an effort to explain what we're doing. I explained many of the design considerations in my blog post [1] on this subject, and I did that precisely because I wanted to help people to be informed.

> Basically - it seems that many people have feeling that their needs are
> being ignored in name of Average Joe and they are asked to leave.

And I've repeatedly stated that that isn't the case (and it really
isn't). There are a whole bunch of things in the GNOME 3 designs which
are specifically intended for 'advanced' users:

 * Keyboard-only application launching and switching
 * Fancy workspaces stuff
 * Shell extensions
 * We designed a GNOME tweak utility [2] nearly a year ago

I'm sure there's more... The plan is to make GNOME 3 the best desktop
out there for a whole range of users, including those who are
technically engaged.

> Sure - I might have done research on topic. I might start reading papers
> or even ask about them on #gnome-shell. I might have been rational But I
> guess that the discussion would be much less heated if the references
> were given - humans are not always rational. I proposed the change to
> have a shift from 180x"Your design ***" to even 10x"Have you considered
> XYZ?" -> "Yes - read paper ABC" or even just include reference to ABC
> (give future historians when GNOME will rule the world some sources ;) ).

There's a long list of references for the shell design on the wiki [3].
Much of the reading which is relevant to the settings is classic
usability stuff, though. We do provide some relevant information on this
[4, 5], if you're interested, but I don't think it's reasonable to
expect us to reference the relevant studies for every single decision
that we make.

> PS. To sum up - I think that community thin.ks that decision are made
> with practically closed doors (not everybody can even observe the
> discussion due to time constraints) and 

The only reason it appears that it's happened in the dark is because
nobody's been looking. This design could have be seen on the wiki or
design repository months ago.

> the results are posted as final
> truths as community is considered too stupid to understand

People keep saying this... _nobody_ is saying that the community is
stupid.

> (I'm NOT
> saying it is true - I'm saying it is the FEELING).

I'm sure it would have been beneficial to have publicised potentially
controversial plans ahead of time. Being able to 'break the news' in a
more controlled way would help. Problem is: we don't have anybody who's
properly employed to do GNOME community management work, and we don't
have enough designers. Communication, documentation and forward planning
all take time and energy.

Allan

[1]
http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/on-laptop-lids-and-power-settings/
[2] http://www.hadess.net/2010/02/were-removing-settings-again.html
[3] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/References
[4] http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/2.32/
[5] http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/HeuristicEvaluation

-- 
Blog: https://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org