Re: usability and getting things done

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Hi Seth,

I certainly agree that the we should respect the decisions of the 
UI team, and that people who want to participate, need to get involved
in the UI team. There is a reason I applied the patch before
sending out my mail, not after.

That being said, I would like to point out that there are other
considerations that need to factor into what we do other
than making the perfect UI.

 A) Implementability in GNOME/GTK+
 B) Degree that UI changes imply API changes
 C) Effort by application writers to switch to the new standard
 D) Uniformity with other applications on the free desktop (*)

I'm sure that the UI team takes these into consideration, but for A) and 
B) in particular, it may quite difficult to tell how things
play out until people look into actually implementing the changes.
So, there will inevitably be some pushback. 

Also, as this thread demonstrates, talking about UI design is vastly
more interesting than making UI decisions, so you have to expect
chatter outside the structure of the UI team and move on.

Regards,
                                        Owen


(*) I'm a little disturbed by the viewpoint that seemed to come up
repeatedly in the conversation from certain parties that the target
user:

 - Has never used a computer before
 - Will not be mixing use GNOME applications with use of other
   applications on the free desktop or with use of proprietary
   operating systems.
 - Will never use anything but GNOME in the future.

Somewhat caricatured, obviously ;-). This is rubbish.

Our users:

 - *Will* be using Mozilla
 - *Will* be using OpenOffice
 - *Will* be using KDE Apps
 - *Will* be using Windows

Any decision that causes a significant UI deviation from what these
environments do must be considered with great care.

We can't do anything about how Windows works except look at it and
recognize that UI interoperability with Windows is a valid concern,
but we need to be talking to people from the other open source
projects and working on _common_ standards. Otherwise, no matter how
beautiful and theoretically useable our UI is, we are doomed to UI
failure.

[ I guess I just haven't started enough heated discussions for this
  week... ]