Re: usability and getting things done

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

sorry, if it wasn't completely obvious this was a frustration-rant
written in a weak moment ;-) I think the point sort of disolved in the
noise... I'm happy to provide reasons and rationale for usability
choices, but you have to realize there's an associated cost in my
ability to get get usability work done, and I hope in the future we'll
earn the community's trust so we don't have to argue out specific
changes as much.

-seth

On Fri, 2001-11-02 at 19:54, Seth Nickell wrote:
> Try to imagine what would happen in a big GNOME module, lets call it
> libfoo, if everyone who contributed had the final say on the code they
> checked in which nobody else could change without their permission. Now
> imagine that anyone in the GNOME project could contribute to libfoo if
> they wanted to.
> 
> My guess is that libfoo would turn into a mess, particularly if more
> than 20 or 30 people were making big contributions and they didn't
> always agree or communicate well with eachother. This module would
> probably really suck. If it were a library, it would probably have
> really messy hard to understand APIs. Implementation probably wouldn't
> be very good either, particularly if the various parts of the module
> weren't working well together.
> 
> Now imagine that you were tasked with making this module not suck. How
> would you go about it? You can't make changes to code without talking to
> the maintainer of that piece of code, probably having to debate with
> them the merits of the change. To make a global scale change you'd have
> to get a bunch of different contributors to agree with you. What do you
> do when one says know? How many people will you have to bicker with?
> What about when a change is less "elegant" for one particular segment of
> the code, but makes it easier for the rest of the thing to work. Can you
> imagine how painful and slow and frustrating this experience would be?
> And how inneffective?
> 
> <suit type="flameretardant">
> There is no GNOME "interface" module one could authoritatively maintain,
> because the GNOME interface is spread through all the modules comprising
> the GNOME project. But in a sense the usability project's job *is* to
> maintain the GNOME interface. So many people will have an opinion on
> almost every interface issue because its easy to have opinions. Most of
> the decisions in a technical module go under the radar because not
> enough people care about that particular esoteric technical detail. And
> if not, there's a maintainer with a vision of the direction he wants to
> go to make sure that a decision gets made, and that things turn out in a
> generally "ok" way. Thats why things actually get done! In usability,
> everyone is an expert and everyone has an opinion.
> 
> In a nutshell, the maintainer system is based on the premise that
> decisive action that not everyone agrees with (a good maintainer will
> try to get maximal agreement of course) is usually preferable to endless
> iteration trying to find the perfect solution.
> 
> I hope people feel a general sense that the usability project will
> result in big improvements in GNOME usability, and hence the desktop as
> a whole. You won't agree with every specific choice or decision we go
> with, but I would ask people to stop second guessing us on every single
> point, you have to be willing to trust our general direction. What I'm
> asking for is trust so we can actually get something done rather than
> having to conduct trench warfare taking ground foot by foot.
> 
> It is *very frustrating* to have to fight out each change with
> individual developers. I don't shirk away from this, and I think I can
> defend any position I take, but it really slows progress down. You
> *WILL* disagree with some of the things the usability project wants to
> change, maybe in a module you maintain. But if you believe that the end
> results of the usability project will be positive, I would ask that your
> defacto response be to accept a change (particularly if you don't have
> to write it yourself, obviously people hack on what they personally feel
> is important and we aren't trying to change that ;-) Right now I feel
> like each change we want to make is guilty until proven to be the right
> change, and we have to make the case to every single developer we end up
> working with. This really really impedes the process.
> 
> Yes, I understand when maintainers want us to justify changes we want to
> make that they personally disagree with. But It'd be really nice if
> people would take a global perspective and realize that somebody
> probably disagrees with a usability change that would positively affect
> them. Most individual usability issues where you disagree with us will
> seem like "yes, but this change you are wrong". But if almost every
> change is like this, and yet the global result is better usability,
> somebody is wrong (and maybe its sometimes us, but on the whole, if what
> we're doing fixes things its probably not) ;-)
> 
> It would be nice if there was some level of trust that we actually have
> some competencies in usability so we can work on making the changes and
> finding the problems (things we *all* probably know needs to be done vis
> a vis GNOME usability) rather than fighting out every change. We'd like
> to maintain and improve the GNOME interface, but we don't "own" the
> code. Please work with us to make our lives easier so we *don't* have to
> deal with the painful "hypothetical" situation I started with.
> 
> thanks if you actually read this far,
> 
> -Seth
> 
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