Re: On the Interaction with the design team

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> wrote:
> Hi Jon!
>
>> Are they listening or participating? Transparency and reporting is
>> pretty simple to solve. Publish logs, document (wiki), and blog and
>> you're pretty much there.  Participation and engagement is much
>> harder. Basically you need to find a way to build a relationship with
>> a designer.  It doesn't have to be on IRC. IRC is just one of the ways
>> people actively working on the design of the GNOME core are
>> communicating. Google docs, git, sparkleshare, and IM are others.
>
> Well, currently many people are just listening (logs, wiki blog) because
> they cannot participate. And it is pretty hard to raise a point once the
> "closed group" came to an agreement.
> What happens is that bugs are filed against certain products which stall
> after some amount of discussion. Sometimes even ending in something that
> *can* be interpreted as "Sorry, you are not a designer, your argument
> doesn't count".

This is completely untrue. First of all, we are an open group - with a
very low bar for entry (show up and do good work), that works entirely
in the open. Secondly, no decision is ever made based on authority due
to some silly label. Many/most of the best designers I know are not
*only* designers.

Agreement is reached in various ways. I think it may be useful to
think about decision making using the terminology in something like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix

Basically:
 * someone must be responsible
 * someone must be accountable
 * many should be consulted
 * and everyone may be informed

Everyone may have an opinion and they are free to express it. However,
not everyone can be consulted before the fact - it is just practically
impossible. Those opinions, however, should be carefully gathered and
analyzed. There are careers for this.

> I think by seperating developers (and other stakeholders) from designers
> we make a big mistake. Design isn't right just because it is done by
> designers especially when we don't talk about classical design art but
> about user-interface design and usability.

This is simply not true. We do not separate developers and designers at all.

Obvious examples of very close relationships between design and
development: GNOME Shell, System Settings, Nautilus, and everything
that will be in 3.2. :)

> Don't get me wrong, I think the overall design of GNOME 3 is pretty good
> but there are certain corners where it would be good if input from
> non-designers and users would have been considered.

I can't claim that we've heard everything but we've heard a lot - more
than we can handle or process in some cases :)  All of it was
carefully considered. Anyone who knows me at all will understand that.
That doesn't mean it is good for my health :)

Jon