RE: UI Guidelines -- What I'm doing

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

On Wed, 2 May 2001, Murray Cumming wrote:

> Dan Mueth wrote:
> > We really need to think about what our goals and roadmap are.  Creating
> > and using a UI guideline will play a very key role.  However, we should
> > try to frame the project in terms of scope and time frame so that it has a
> > tangible effect on GNOME 2.0.  If the scope is too broad, if the time
> > frame is too long, if the quality is not good enough, if we can't all
> > agree to the extent that we can adopt the guidelines, if we are unable to
> > get developers to implement the guidelines, etc., then all this work would
> > be in vain and GNOME 2.0 will be as unusable as GNOME 1.4 or even more so.
> > > Call For Writers
> 
> Realistically, you will need to give some initial examples of different
> goals if you want to stimulate a discussion about them.

Darn.  You're actually going to make me do some productive work here
aren't you ;)

Some example goals for GNOME 2.0 time frame for the UI part of GUP:
  * Guidelines for the following parts of the UI:
      * Menus
      * Dialogs
      * Text (ie. a word list with definitions, case, etc.)
      * Keybindings
  * Review of core GNOME apps for adherence to Guidelines above
      (ie. write bug reports for bad violations of the guidelines)
  * Mission statement and description of how we will proceed
      (We need to write up our goals, how we plan to proceed, etc.
       We need to get this past gnome-hackers and get support from
       the community so that hackers agree that they will use the
       guidelines at a certain level before we write up a guidelines
       which they later state they don't want to follow.  We may
       also bring this before the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors
       if we decide it is important that GNOME follows these and
       we need the Board's backing.)
  * Review of font issues
  * Review of icon issues
  * Review of theming issues
  * Review of window manager issues
  * Review of control center/configuration issues
  (these last few may belong in the following section)

Some example goals for GNOME 2.0 time frame for other parts of GUP:
  * Determine structure of GUP
  * User Testing mission statement, overview, and basic doc on how
    it is done
  * User testing roadmap
  * Review of applications in core GNOME release. Classify:
      good, needs work, replace, throw out
  * Identify vacancies in core GNOME release which need to be filled
     eg. RMS wants a real printer applet ;)
     Perhaps some things in the software map should be in the core
     GNOME release?
  * User feedback accumulation and synthesis
  * Accessibility stuff (I know nothing of this, so Calum will have
    to discuss it.)
  * i18n/l10n review - just look for glaring problems and let the 
    translation project deal with the rest

Hopefully this is a good starting point for discussion.  I whipped this up
very quickly, so it could certainly use some more revision and fleshing
out.

Dan