Re: Call for constructive user criticism.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On 1 Aug 1999, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> > department (U. Toronto comes to mind) and "partner" with them.
> > Partnering is good, because it is marketing buzzword #45.
> 
> I agree that a partnership would be good.  Why not go for the
> University of Michigan, in the form of the Linux/UNIX Independent
> Group for Usability Information, <URL:http://www.luigui.org/>, which
> might have been created for this sort of thing?
> 

luigui's site is down, and their mailing list has had about 5 messages in
the last several months, so I don't think they're very active.

The problem with HCI departments is the same problem we had with
gnome-gui-list: lots of pie-in-the-sky "let's rewrite the whole damn
thing" goo, not many small, concrete, workable improvements to the
existing codebase. This is what we need. I don't think small tweaks to an
essentially windows-icon-mouse UI are going to interest HCI researchers.
I could be wrong.

And please, no one start the thread about "we should be radically
inventing the UI, not copying Mac/Win, blah blah" unless you can supply
enough hackers to write several hundred thousand lines of code. If you
don't have those hackers, don't waste our bandwidth. :-)

The challenge of this initiative is to get concrete, specific suggestions
for enhancing apps. If it loses that focus, it's worthless.

Havoc