Re: UI Guidelines -- What I'm doing

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 1 May 2001, Joakim Ziegler wrote:
> 
> > Personally, I don't think we'll be able to have the UI 
> > guidelines ready for GNOME 2.0. Isn't the freeze date some time in July?
> 
> Exactly.  That is why we need to plan our work more carefully and try to
> figure out what we can get done in the GNOME 2.0 time frame.  We can
> definitely write certain key parts of the Guidelines in this time frame,
> and have a very significant effect on GNOME 2.0.

Well, one plan that Robin Jeffries (usability guru at Sun, but sadly
with little or no time to spend on GNOME right now) was knocking around
with Arlo a month or so ago was to start off with a more checklist-based
approach-- it went a bit like this.  (I hope Arlo will jump in here and
correct me if I'm misreporting their discussions, because I wasn't
involved):

They thought that a short list of "50 things to always/never do in a
GNOME application" would be a good first step, and would be a short-term
substitute for the real checklist (which of course ought to be written
from the styleguide, not before).

1.  The checklist co-ordinator sends out an announcement to
usability/gnome-gui-list telling the world that we are going to write
this short document, that community members are invited to contribute
candidate items, and that he/she has agreed to pull together the
contributions, manage the decision process for what the top 50 should
be, and write things up in a readable way. 

2.  In parallel, a couple of other people (probably ones who've been
involved with styleguides before, poor souls!) come up with a candidate
list of their own, to make doubly-sure that the important things get
covered.

3.  Contributions come in; the co-ordinator's mailbox is full :o)

4.  We use the contributions to create the checklist, and hopefully also
to spot the best writing/HCI talents who we can then persuade to join
the full styleguide team when we have one  :o)

The hard part, of course, is then figuring out how to manage the review
of the list-- one or two people working together probably ought to
create a proposed version, and then we can all figure out how to drive
that to concensus.

As for the full-blown styleguide itself, I think Robin also mentioned
that Arlo had an outline that he was planning to flesh out one level
below the chapter titles-- I don't know if this is the case or not, but
one or two other people on the list have also proposed outlines anyway,
so we should have something to start from one way or another.

To get things done most efficiently, there probably ought to be several
levels of involvement in the styleguide/checklist project.  While not
everybody will necessarily have the writing or HCI background to
contribute large chunks of text to the styleguide, for example, they
could certainly help the effort by applying the aforementioned checklist
to existing apps and filing bugs against the UI-- while at the same time
giving feedback to the writing team on how useful/appropriate (or
otherwise!) the checklist is proving to be in practice.  Yes, this
essentially means usability testing some of our usability testing
documents :o)

Anyway, the "start from a checklist and work up" approach sounded to me
like a pretty good way to get things moving, on that front at least...
anybody have any others?

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771