Re: [Usability] HIG - Human Interaction Guide

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 01:58, Nickolay V. Shmyrev wrote:

> How application should save it's geometry - on per-document basis or
> globally. 

That should really be taken care of by the GNOME infrastructure... the
HIG doesn't deal with things that the developer shouldn't have to care
about.

> What to do on document overwrite or input-output error. 

That should ideally be a low-level thing as well, although I'm guessing
it currently isn't.

> How application should work with document metadata. How to provide document
> navigation (browser-like style or another way, I have no ideas). How
> handle multiple documents, what to do if users request tabs. Should
> application provide file menu or something like this. What should task-
> based application do, or do non-document application allowed. 

We could certainly go into more detail in some of those things, although
I think it covers the whole tabs / multiple document thing fairly
explicitly.  (Albeit not to everyone's liking.)

> When developer should write applet and when use notification area.

There's an (embryonic) section about this in the current HIG, but it
needs a lot more work:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-notification-area.html#desktop-notification-or-applet


> Should applications be spatial.
> 
> Is it possible to append such chapters to HIG or it should be standalone
> document?

I think it belongs in the HIG.  I've been threatening to draft an
'application taxonomy' section for a while that would probably address
many of your issues, but I haven't got around to it yet.  (And I'm also
worried that it might mean restructuring much of the rest of the HIG
around it, which mightn't be a bad thing, but not something I have a lot
of time to put much thought into at the moment.)

> I know, that without appropriate support of development platform it
> would be hard to reach consistency in application behavior, but HIG
> experience shows that just writing a standard of something similar helps a lot,
> supporting libraries would be much easier to write if there will be
> document with detailed description.

This is a problem we've always had with the HIG... it probably needs to
be clearer whether it's a practical document (i.e. it only shows you
what to do with what's available) or an aspirational one (i.e. a spec
for future gtk/GNOME enhancements), but I don't think we've ever been
totally sure ourselves.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems