Re: [Usability] 2.7/2.8 UI Review

[Bryan Clark <clarkbw clarkson edu>]

Hi ~

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 19:26, Murray Cumming organized 1s and 0s into:
> Bryan, you did a fantastic job on the UI Review for 2.5/2.6, probably
> the best so far. Do you expect to take charge of it for 2.7/2.8 as
> well? 

Thanks, I'm expecting to take charge of this for the 2.[78] release;
there are a few new things I'd like to try and my docs are still in
draft form.

> There's one smallish change that will affect you. You'll notice that
> there's no ui-review freeze date on the GNOME schedule now:
> http://www.gnome.org/start/2.7/
> 
> This is because we want to delegate more to sub-teams, particularly now
> we've seen the success of the bugzilla, ui-review, i18n, and
> accessibility sub-teams. And we want to make it clear that it's always
> ui-review time, just like it's always bug-fixing time. However, I
> anticipate that you'll want to have some kind of ui-review schedule,
> even if it's just a bunch of ui-review days, because dates are
> motivators, and they help to focus teamwork.

Yes, I'd like to try this system.  Scheduling the ui-review period for
the last couple weeks before release is like telling the cooks that
we're inspecting the quality of their ingredients as they pull food out
of the oven.  There's really no going back to fix things without lots of
extra work.

Here's about how I'm looking to work the ui-review this time:

	Spanning over the entire release schedule with 3 evenly separated
phases all discussion done via logged IRC and email.  I'd like to report
summaries of discussions to the usability list and maybe clutter the
d-d-l with it too.  Here are the phases in order:

	1st Phase
		Review future plans of modules with maintainers, hopefully maintainers
have sent messages to the list with their plans for this coming release.
Also basing this discussion off the recently seen GNOME roadmap [1].
		
	2nd Phase
		Review changes to modules; this will cover interaction/usability
issues relative to the implementation of changes.

	3rd Phase
		Traditional UI-Review where before release we try to make sure things
are as HIG compliant as possible or I start busting knee caps.

Emailed summary of discussions at each phase will look something like:

	----

	To: usability, ddl
	Subject: UI-Review of Nautilus

	emblems system discussed, issues are x,y,z possible solutions are l,k,m
and it was agreed to go with solution b.

	backgrounds and emblems conversion discussed, issue is this...
resolution is that progress is being made, but will not be pushed into
next release.

	campd admitted to not actually knowing how the Trash works, but will
look into it before the future release. ;-)

	----

It would be nice if discussion would take place off of these summaries
as the come out, however interested parties would do well to try and
attend any ui-review session too.

> Of course, if you feel that the previous way was better, then we can go
> back to it. The release-team is happy to defer to you on this.

nope, but thanks. :-)

> It might be best to put the ui-review pages on the usability project
> pages rather than the start pages - and we'll add a link to them just
> like before.

Yes, I think that will work well.

~ Bryan

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~campd/gnome-roadmap.txt