Re: Prioritiy for UI issues?

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 14:33, Dave Fallon wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 09:32:41PM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> > I understand why some members of the usability team want to dictate
> > importance. But I think I've proved over the past ten months that it is
> > much better for maintainers to trust your judgement and work with them.
> > Usability in GNOME will not succeed in the long run unless that is the
> > approach usability chooses to take.

> And to put it another way, if you can't convince a maintainer your
>  usability bug is good to fix, maybe it isn't all that good to fix. :)

Well, the objection the usability people make (and it's a valid one,
sort of) is that they understand the problem a little better than many
maintainers and so what you say isn't necessarily true. I'm not going to
argue that issue- I'm arguing a more minimal point, which is that
maintainers who do this for fun[1] have to agree because forcing them to
do things they don't want to do is not fun for them nore healthy for
GNOME. 'Right' and 'wrong' don't matter here- what matters is
'community' and 'fun'. We aren't a corporation- we do this for the love
of things.

>  The maintainers need/should trust the usability team about usability
>  bugs, but that trust needs to be built, it doesn't come for free. The
>  HIG is a step in the right direction, as it's easier to explain that
>  way, but it might be worth including more of the argument and reason
>  behind the HIG decisions either in the HIG, or in a companion
>  document, so there's a public way for the maintainers to understand
>  where the usabilty folks are coming from.

FWIW, the HIG often includes rationale in the raw XML, but not in the
finished HTML. I'm not sure that is the best approach but at least it is
documented.

Luis

[1]i.e., hopefully all maintainers