Re: Design in the open

[Felipe Erias Morandeira <femorandeira igalia com>]

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On 25/04/12 15:27, Allan Day wrote:
> * lack of design resources - we are always trailing behind where
> we want to be, and there are important tasks which we are unable
> to complete (a new HIG springs to mind)


Caused by this, the design process in GNOME might be often shallow,
based on static mockups, sparsely documented, and lacking enough
justification and evaluation *before* the proposed changes get
committed to code.

Mistakes in design happen. This is just a natural part of the work and
not bad in itself ("fail early and fail often"). However, in GNOME
some of those problems in the original designs might take a long time
to be detected, acknowledged and fixed. By the time an alternative
proposal can be implemented, it has to go against the existing
(published) behaviour and deal with a code base that was written to
enable the old solution ("scar tissue", as Cooper calls it).

GNOME has very ambitious goals: to create an environment that works on
tablets and desktops, along with ~20 core applications. This is not an
easy task at all, and we only have a very small group of professional
designers to work on it.

There might be a mismatch between our current resources and goals.
Maybe we need to scale either, or both, so that GNOME designers can
focus much more in solving each problem better.


Felipe
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