Re: [Usability] Evolution 2.0

[Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>]

Hello Ali,

> I hope my opinion is as welcome as everyones elses opinion.

Why would it not be? I am not sure that I understand your attitude. :) I
posted this work here with the express intent of getting opinions from
anyone who wanted to contribute. Let me take this opportunity to thank
you for taking the time to share your thoughts.


> I saw these screenshots some days ago when Ettore announced them on the
> Ximian Evolution Hackers list and I have a bit mixed feelings about that
> and I am probably the wrong person commenting here too but I think these
> mockups are contraproductive to what the usability team tries to achive
> within GNOME and I am a bit worried why Ximian is not following the HIG
> and the usability recommendations of GNOME in general. While the
> pictures DO look nice, they on the otherhand are in no way HIG
> compliant.

Hmm. Mockups are just tools, I would say.. and it is how they are used
that is productive or counterproductive. I sent this mail to the
usability list with exactly the intention of involving the Gnome
usability community. :) This would seem to me to be a good (read:
productive) step in inviting this community to participate in Evo's
development. 

As for your implication that Ximian (and much of this falls to me,
because I am the designer for our products) does not care about the HIG,
I am happy to assure you that you are incorrect. :) (more on this
later.)


>  Some friends of mine even told me that Ximian
> Evolution is trying to copy the look and feel of Outlook Professional.

This is not true, I am sorry if your friends gave you incorrect
information. Please do correct them if you happen to be talking about
this again.


> Ok I hope I didn't offended you by this and I am sure that you heard
> people asking to HIGIFY Evolution for various times now. 

And if you followed the release of Evo 1.4, then you would know that we
have been progressively working on HIGifying it for sometime now. :) 

Because porting Evo to use the Gnome 2 libraries took so much time and
energy, we have had to postpone some of our attempts to *finish*
HIGifying Evo-- but that is no way means that we aren't trying. The
spacing, padding, button names, button order, etc, etc etc of Evo 1.4
are much more HIG-ified than they were in previous releases, I assure
you. Evo is simply a gigantic app, and this work takes a lot of time.

Let me assure you that we do value, respect, and intend to honor the
HIG. 

> I also heard
> that you (Ximian) rejected the help from some individuals who spent a
> lot of time and gained a lot of knowledge in higification.

This is absolutely not true, and I am saddened to hear such a rumor. :(
We have sometimes had to postpone patches from contributors because they
broke string freeze, but, we have always welcomed any contributions. 

(The trick is that any development of the UI, whether it be from outside
contributors or Ximian employees, has to fit into Evo's release cycle.
So, sometimes we can't make UI changes because strings are frozen, or
the UI is frozen, or we have to focus on backend issues. But really,
anyone who wants to help is more than welcome.)

Please let me know if you are referencing a specific incident, so that I
can address it.
 
> I mean what usability advise do you expect from a team of GNOME members
> that spent months and years into writing HIG and GNOME specific Advises
> if they are not being adopted by the Evolution team.

Again, we have been progressively adopting them since the beginning of
our port to 2.0. Unfortunately, the HIG fails to address many issues
that we need to think about (for example, how to deal with spacing and
padding inside of windows which are not gtk_dialogs), so we have had to
work with the HIG developers (in particular, I have been in touch with
Calum about this) so that we can better put the ideas of the HIG into
practice, even when the HIG itself lacks information. When we finish
doing this, it is my hope that we will actually be able to contribute
new information to the HIG, based on our experiences. 

Now, if there could be some input about the actual content of these
screenshots, that would be super. Thanks again for your questions, Ali.
I do hope that I have cleared up some of your questions. 

sincerely, 
Anna
-- 
Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>