Re: [Usability]List policy, usability leadership, mission statement [Was: "widget"]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Wed, 2002-07-31 at 04:35, Pat Costello wrote:
> On 31 Jul 2002 Jeff Waugh wrote: 
> 
> > It's disappointing that usability@ and the usability team is suffering from
> > the same woes that the hitsquad did:
> > 
> >   - Clear, transparent leadership
> >   
> >   - Usability team mission statement
> >   
> >   - Lack of list policy and standards for behaviour, etc.
> > 
> > Until those are resolved, this list can be pretty much relegated to a high
> > quality entropy source.
> > 
> 
> Well, if the list were just a high quality entropy source, I wouldn't be so 
> worried. The fact that a discussion point can make it from the list to bugzilla, 
> while the discussion is still in train, and while there is still a large degree 
> of uncertainty around the need for the discussion point, shows that there is 
> potential for a negative impact on the GNOME UI design. There does need to be 
> some sort of regulated output from the usability alias.

A bug being entered in bugzilla does not mean its a honest-to-goodness
bug. Bugzilla gets tons of random bug reports related to usability from
tons of random people that range from good observations, to crap, to
identification of a real problem and a crap suggestion. 

If random list posters are creating bugs mid discussion and claiming to
summarize the conclusions of the list, that is a problem, but I have yet
to see that happen. Otherwise, I don't see them logging bugzilla bugs
containing their opinions as very problematic. In many ways, I prefer to
have concrete usability discussions inside a bug report rather than on
list unless it affects a major portion of the populace because it leaves
a concrete "paper trail" related to that issue.

-Seth