The website, and the project itself (Was: Re: The website twins...)

[zinie cs unibo it (Enrico Zini)]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 03:37:41PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:

> guess we can switch it around again.  When, that is, anyone decides what
> should actually be on the new usability website anyway  :)

Ready!  Let's get to work!

I will try to sum up the status of the project as of now, and I expect
someone to complete and correct me, since I know very little of what was
happening in the pre-guadec age.

---------

The Gnome Usability Project divides itself in three activities (from what
I remember from the Usability BOF):

 1. Write the Gnome Usability Guidelines
 2. Form a Gnome Usability Team to do usability research on Gnome and
    supervise, tutor and coordinate Gnome projects from a usability point
    of view
 3. Directly write specifications and code to implement usability
    improvements (the actual UI Hitsquad)


The status of the activities is:

 1. Many ideas, no work done yet
 2. No team is there; Sun and Ximian (others?) are doing (unrelated?)
    researches on their usability labs.  Sun published their results on
    d.g.o/gup
 3. AFAIK, There is d.g.o/gnome-ui up and running, and people working.


What to do from now:

 - lay out a summary of the Gnome Usability Project and its goals
 - discuss if there are also other activities to start
 - decide what do we want from each one of our activities
 - find who will start coordination and work on them.

---------


For what concerns myself, I'd like to work on point 2, and I already have
many ideas for it do discuss and implement.  I've been able to have this
project as the subject of my master thesis at the university, and in
september, when I plan to start working on the thesis, I expect to be very
active in the project.  Until then, I'll do my best with the time I have,
and I plan to be fairly involved anyway.

Even if I'd like to get involved mainly in usability research, I have many
computing skills, and I guess I could help in designing and deploying
things we might need, like polling systems and who knows.  Don't count on
me for everything, though. :-)


To complete my profile, my internet connection is a pay-per-second dialup
line, with flat-rate access from 00:00 to 09:00, until the telecoms here
decide to get out of stone age and bring ADSL coverage to my home.

This means that I'll tend to work mainly offline, that I'll be reachable
mainly by e-mail, and that I'll have problems being available on IRC,
except after midnight local time (GMT+01) when I plan to eventually go to
bed.


> There's also a proposal on the site (from Dan) that people start
> frequenting #usability on IRC... I don't know if that'll just confuse
> people who've been used to hanging out on #interface up until now, but
> we'll see how it goes I guess...

I hope all discussions won't move to IRC, even if I recognize it can be
useful to meet there sometimes, and I'll try to get there, from time to
time, maybe 'on appointment'.  We'll see.



Now is the turn of the others here: who's there? what do you want to do?


I hope to hear news soon!

				Ciao! Enrico



P.S.
The reply-to is not set to the list, I don't know why.
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