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

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> > If we can make UI decisions (instead of punting and making it
> > configurable or whatever), and can communicate those decisions (by
> > documenting them in HIG and bugzilla), then we have something that
> > works.
> 
> Agreed. The challenge of leading this team is, IMHO, the biggest problem
> facing GNOME right now- we want to move forward on usability of the
> desktop, the hackers need guidance and help, and no guidance and help is
> forthcoming. 

Honestly Luis, I find that a little insulting and a dramatic
overstatement of the case. I spend 75%+ of the time I'm on IRC helping
at least one hacker with interface design or usability. Being available
to hackers who need guidance and help is one of the few things I have
been consistently good at. Please at least give me credit in the areas
where I have things right, ok? I take enough crap from all sides already
(hackers, disgruntled users who lost a cherished preference, etc etc).

Some things Jeff said were, I think inaccurate. First, I agree with Luis
that to a large extent the time of the more senior usability people we
have now is finishing the HIG. I don't have a huge amount of time since
I have a fulltime job, but I've been putting a couple hours into this
every night. It is getting done. Calum I know is working on it too.
Secondly, we have a mission statement. I don't have it titled as a
mission statement, but its clearly positioned as such on the usability
project web page:

"The Usability Project strives to make the GNOME experience as pleasant
and efficient as possible. The project aims both to aid developers in
their efforts to create intuitive applications, and to lead by creating
designs and detailed mockups toward a cohesive and beautiful new
generation of the GNOME desktop. The Usability Project achieves these
goals through the creation of an interface guide defining and evolving
the GNOME user interface, working with maintainers to find existing
interaction problems through user testing, and the visual/interactive
engineering of new desktop components."

And finally, particularly given that the GNOME 2 release was
specifically *not* targeted to have usability changes, I think those of
us working in usability got a ton of them done. Inumerable hours have
been spent by several of us doing everything from working on the HIG,
giving advice to hackers, commenting on usability bug related reports
(thank you very much for your help on this BTW, it really facilitated
things) and looking at the desktop to find major areas that need
usability fixing. So there's not a formal functioning usability project.
That needs to be fixed, I agree. But I have consistently heard you voice
what I think is a major misconception: that the usability project is at
a huge loss because its not availing of the huge number of people on
this list and others interested in GNOME usability. Usability differs
here from bug triage: much (most?) usability work that can really be
done on GNOME right now requires actual expertise. Bug triage can be
effectively managed by an army of eagre interested people.

We have things like gnome-love for ushering interested in parties in
becoming GNOME hackers. On the whole they have not been wildly
successful, but there have been wins. We definitely need something like
this for usability: provide the resources, ideas, and experiences for
people to upgrade their usability knowledge to the point that they can
make a big positive contribution to GNOME usability. But its important
to realize that the expectation from this is probably to gain a couple
or a few new major contributors to GNOME usability.

Now when the HIG is done there's going to be a lot more opportunity for
people with less expertise (or even just less time) to make significant
contributions. And we're working on it. Really. There's just not a lot
of people really qualified to producing such a document involved with
GNOME right now, and we're also the people in highest demand for doing
other usability tasks like consulting with hackers about specific issues
and questions.

Jeff and I had a phone conversation about figuring out how to make
usability work better about an hour ago too, so problems are being
worked on. And maybe this is partly an issue of "we need to publicize
our resources and what work we have done better". I'm not fully sure at
this point. But given that GNOME 1.4 -> GNOME 2.0 is one of the biggest
jumps in GNOME usability, we're working with hackers every day, and the
HIG is getting finished I fail to see this supposed major whole in GNOME
usability. We *do* have a major whole in people with experience,
training, and usability expertise, but please don't necessarily chalk
that up to a big problem with leadership.

-Seth