Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

"Blad, John Erling" wrote:
>
> I belive it is very important to defines rules for the UI that don't break
> if some vendor makes a funny UI.

Sure, the guidelines need to be flexible up to a point, and in any
styleguide there will typically be more 'guidelines' than 'rules'.  

On the other hand the main aim of a styleguide is to enforce consistency
between applications.  Any vendor who is making a 'funny UI' ought to be
doing it for a good reason (e.g. a game), in which case they could
reasonably expect to be exempt from following much of the styleguide
anyway.  (But not all, e.g. the installation process, should we choose
to cover that).  

But any vendor who's designing (radically) different UIs for mainstream
applications just to show how cool they are quite often just needs their
wrist slapped  :)  Especially when you get into the realms of
accessibility, where following strict guidelines becomes important if
your app is to work with assistive technologies, for example. 
(Occasionally of course, they will design something that offers a
genuine usability improvement that can be generalised to work across the
whole GNOME desktop... at which point there's a valid case for
incorporating it into other GNOME applications, and into the
styleguide.)

That's not to say we shouldn't be constantly striving to improve GNOME's
user interface by trying different things... and indeed the guidelines
should allow those different things to exist, but within a stable,
consistent framework.  Anything more radical than that, if
widely-accepted, is likely to fundamentally change the way the GNOME
desktop works, at which point the styleguide will probably need to be
torn up and rewritten anyway  :)

> A bit more common are dialogs with web-like interfaces.

Well, if we believe dialogs with web-like interfaces are going to be a
key part of GNOME in the future, we should write guidelines for those
too.  Otherwise, developers will just extrapolate the 'normal' dialog
guidelines in different ways, and we'll end up with as much
inconsistency as we started with!

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems