Re: [Usability]Short article on OSS usability

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 12:09:02AM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: 
> I know I keep bringing this up, but this is another reason why we need a
> good set of guidelines for contributing to GNOME usability work. How can
> professional and 'amateur' contributors work with GNOME effectively? How can
> we encourage them to make developer-friendly contributions?

Calum's colleague recommended "designing from both sides of the
screen" by Isaacs and Waldendowski, and one of the really valuable 
things in this book is a concrete, practical description of how
to manage the interaction between developers and UI designers.

UI designers do seem to find open source frustrating, which is a
shame. I think Seth and Calum and others have managed to have very
significant impact, but then there are many more UI people who think
they want to help, but aren't willing to do all the grunt work in
bugzilla and patiently have all the arguments and write the
guidelines. Or that don't understand how to do that.

Of course, the same thing happens with programmers - some core
programmers do most of the work. The difference is, when programmers
get their patches rejected, they don't go off on rants about how
there's no way open source can ever produce good code. ;-)

Havoc