Re: UI Guidelines -- What I'm doing

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> underdeveloped, and might be plain wrong in many respects. I'd like to see
> the UI guidelines be pretty definitive and not change a huge amount after a
> 1.0 release.

Given the experience (or lack thereof) we have working on UI guidelines,
and usability in general, it does not seem reasonable to expect we will
"get it right" or anywhere in that ballpark for 1.0. Microsoft took a
*long time* to develop good guidelines, and that is with some reasonably
experience people. Unless we can import more talent I suspect that its
going to take many many waves of user testing and rewrites before we can
become as static as systems like MacOS have been.

I think we should go into this knowing the guidelines will need to be
completely rewritten post-1.0. Having some guidelines is better than
none, and will improve the state of UI affairs (hopefully) for GNOME 2.x
releases (probably not 2.0, but hopefully revisions). During that time
we will learn what we did wrong and revise, and hopefully GNOME 3.0 will
be based on much better guidelines.

Hence we'll be writing not the GNOME UI Guidelines 1.0, but the "GNOME
UI Guidelines for the GNOME 2 platform"

-Seth