Re: [HIG] Naming

[Kathy Fernandes <fernande nosc mil>]

All,

I vote for "GNOME User Interface Guidelines" or "GNOME Human 
Interface Guidelines."  I would not recommend including "standard" in 
the title.  Guidelines normally contain "should" statements whereas 
standards contain "shall's."

> Style implies it's a matter of taste. Standard implies that it's all
> hard and fast, black and white rules. But it's not! Interface design
> is all about gray areas and tradeoffs. The ultimate arbiter of
> correctness is user testing, not any list of rules.

While I agree that design decisions should be based on user testing, 
are there design conventions such as action names, order of menu 
contents, shortcuts that we want to "strongly encourage" (require?) 
developers to use (to ensure consistency across applications within a 
system)?  Are there some guidelines that need to be stated as "shall" 
rather than "should" so that this happens?

Adam indicated that the document is "more of a guideline/policy doc 
than a how-to manual."  Will there be a policy statement on what it 
means for an application to be "GNOME-compliant" with regard to its 
user interface?  Is a "compliant" application one that "must" follow 
the guidelines?  Or can a "compliant" application diverge from the 
guidelines if the divergence is justified by usability testing?

As someone who provides UI direction to a diverse group of 
application developers, I find it difficult to make policy 
pronouncements related to "doing the right thing" with regard to 
usability when the guidelines contain "should's" rather than 
"shall's."  When time and funds are limited, developers tend to 
"defer" addressing usability considerations if they are not stated as 
application requirements.  I'm not advocating that the content of the 
HIG change, only that these questions be discussed at some point (if 
they haven't been already).

Kathy