Usability and UI design (was: Re: UI Guidelines -- What I'm doing)

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

I thought I would clarify the UI vs. usability issue, since a lot of
people seem to be confused about it...

As I'm sure everybody knows, usability includes UI design as well as many
other components, such as user testing and user feedback
collection.  

Because usability is an umbrella project and because UI design is a
high-bandwidth topic, the mailing lists and IRC channels are set up as
follows:

Mailing lists:
  gnome-gui-list gnome org - Discussion of UI issues
  usability gnome org - Discussion of general usability issues
                        (ie. everything except details of UI design)

IRC:
  #interface - Discussion of UI design
  #usability - Discussion of general usability issues

This way people working on the overall usability work, user testing,
collecting user feedback, etc. don't drown in the high volume of UI design
discussion.

As for the web pages, they are combined, because people are not likely to
drown in a web page;)  So, the GUP (GNOME Usability Project) has a single
web page at:
    http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

Calum has written some great content for the site, and Kenny and I have
been maintaining it (along with the rest of d.g.o.).  With the help of
everybody else on these lists, we hope to develop this into a more
complete site with UI guidelines, more information on user testing,
etc.  If you have suggestions for additional content, please email Kenny
(on cc list) and myself :)

Dan


On Tue, 1 May 2001, colin z robertson wrote:

> For the last two months or so I have been trying to resurrect the UI
> Guidelines document in Gnome CVS at /gnome-libs/devel-docs/ui-guide.
> So far I have written a section on dialogs and I'm working on a
> section on menus. I have some fairly basic mechanisms for handling
> i18n in the document.
> 
> My work so far is available at
> http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~s.robertson/software/ui-guide
> 
> colin
> 
>   _____________________________                            ____
>   rtnl  http://rational.cjb.net     c z robertson ndirect co uk
>                                                    icq 13294163
>