Re: [Usability] 2.7/2.8 UI Review

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 19:03 -0400, Bryan Clark wrote:
> 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

I don't think it was ever just before the release, but it does tend to
happen just before UI freeze.

>  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.

This sounds smart and constructive. I like it.

> > 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 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com