Re: [Usability]HIG compatability for grubconf

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 01:14:34AM -0500, Joseph Monti wrote:
> 
> I am the project manager for Grubconf, a Gnome2 based GRUB configuration
> utility. We are to the point where we would like to focus on usability
> and compliance with the Gnome HIG. I've read the HIG, but this is my
> first Gnome app and I may not have gotten it right.
> 
> Would you mind taking a look at our app and providing a few pointers?
> 

It helps a lot to start on a higher level - the book I'm recommending
this month is "designing from both sides of the screen" because it has
a whole practical process for that.

Basically:

 - identify your target users in specific detail
 - list the reasons they want to use your app
 - sort those by things everyone will do often, everyone will do once
   or twice, some people will do often, some people will do once or 
   twice
 - organize the GUI prioritizing things by those categories

If you approach it as "fit all the grub.conf fields into widgets" then
you really haven't made a large UI improvement over "vi grub.conf," at
most you can validate the contents of the fields etc. but a good
error-checking app will already do that when it loads the config file.

But if you're trying to make it easy to do 5 or 6 specific common
tasks that specific users will want to do, you could probably make the
UI really slick.

Havoc