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

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 11:33, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Seth Nickell">
> 
> > Effectively the "usability team" is a very small set of people.
> 
> "Who is the usability team?"

I think this is a good question to answer, but not all that important.
Having hard and fast boundries is not a desperate need at the moment.

> > Small groups of people don't need as much explicit structure to be able to
> > work and interact effectively. Definitely some, but not as much. (Take
> > Tuomas and Jimmac working on icons for example, I think usability is more
> > effectively managed closer to that format than say, how the release team
> > works). 
> 
> "Who makes the final call?"

I do. See below.

> > Now where this all goes south is when said team needs to interact more
> > with the world.... Our "organization crisis" is mostly an external problem
> > than an internal problem right now. So what we *most* need to do is not
> > "establish clear leadership" but establish clear channels by which we
> > communicate group consensus, findings, decisions, whatever.
> 
> "Who is responsible for that communication?"

We all are, though ultimately, I am.

> You've been pointing out the problems, but not solutions. I've suggested
> that by providing a point of contact, and a responsible person, many of
> these issues can be solved. Perhaps that will be a team - great. Not only
> will this provide direction for GNOME usability work, but hopefully for
> contributors on this list.

Good grief, I hate harping on this, but here goes: in case it hasn't
been made 100% clear I am and have been for about a year project lead
for GNOME usability. Jeff, I would be rather shocked if you did not know
this. But further, I would be suprised if every major person involved
with GNOME (and many contributors too) were not aware of this. This is
listed on the GUP website (so its even formally stated), and should have
been fairly clear from mailing lists, GUADEC, etc.

> Yeah, I'm harping on this, but only due to experience. Look at our docs team
> - they've had a string of great coordinators / team leaders, and they've
> done a lot of great work. We need something similar from the usability
> quagmire (when the team is defined, let's call it a team).

You are assuming that with a high degree of organization usability will
suddenly start being more productive? I don't think this is true. Formal
organization usually has an administrative overhead too. With small
groups of people that overhead often outweighs the benefits
substantially. I know organization makes you feel all warm and fuzzy,
but its simply not as important for small teams (I don't care if we term
it a team or not. Its fine with me if its GNOME usability people). 

If you'd like to help provide that organization and also eat the
simultaneous administrative overhead costs it will impose, I'd welcome
that, but I think its an instance of good leadership that I'm not
diverting the resources of one of the very few GNOME usability people
(myself) to something that's not as important as other things I am doing
now.

What we do need is more usability-savvy, insightful, and dedicated
usability people. And trust me, we've been trying to recruit them for
the HIG. The pool of people who "know usability" and are also interested
in working on something like GNOME is very small.

Basically, its harder for me to say outright, but I agree with Maciej. I
feel like we achieved very substantial and satisfactory results for
GNOME 2.0 given the human resources available. I'm happy to dedicate
energy to improving formal cooperation, and I'm happy to try and work on
improving the effectiveness of contributions from (and invest in
mentoring) non-usability-people-who-are-interested. We need people and
we just ain't getting them "pre-edumacated". I'm not happy to talk about
crisis of organization that don't exist.

-Seth