Re: [Usability] UI Guidelines for GNOME-related Web Interfaces

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Samuel Abels wrote:

> Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:25:50 +0000
> From: Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] UI Guidelines for GNOME-related Web Interfaces
>
> Hi,
>
> Are there any guidelines for GNOME related web interfaces?

Not that I know of, if you asked the Gnome Web Team they might have some
suggestions.
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gwh/

The KISS maxim is as relevant as ever: Keep It Simple Stupid.

> I am looking for something like the HIG for HTML pages.

There are many sources of this kind of information already available,
there seem to be far more books available at the moment on Web usability
rather than usability of dekstop applications.

The Gnome documentation style guide is worth reading but probably not
directly relevant to what you really want.
http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/

Jakob Nielsen has plenty to say http://useit.com and he provides pithy
lists of things to do, if you can follow most of them you will have a
website far better than average.
My favourite if his rules is links should be blue and underlined.
A lot of what he recommends is about givin users what they expect, so if
you are determined to do a tree view you should make it behave the same as
a standard tree view (but for what you are suggesting to work in a nice
and smooth way I expect you will need a bucket load of javascript).


> Obviously, since web sites all have an individual look and feel,

No, not really.  If you are using Opera and client side style sheets web
pages look exactly how the user wants them to look.  User are retaking the
web from graphic designers who think they know better, the popularity of
tools like greasemonkey are a testament to this trend.

The best websites have a very plain underlying structure and it the
stylesheets that really make them look how they do, and the allow users to
switch to Alternate Stylesheets.

My point is dont get too hung up on how it looks, but make sure it is
simpel and works as intended and you can add the style later.  Look how
simple Google keeps their various sites and look how sucessful they are.
The use good old fashioned hyperlinks and do not try to rebuild a GUI
toolkit in the browser.

> such guidelines wouldn't be as strict as the HIG, but there are other
> problems where a specification might be helpful.

> I believe that it were helpful if such trees were handled in a
> consistent manner.

Yes, but unless it is absolutely necessary to use a tree widget I'd
recommend avoiding it and using simpler more reliable lists of links.

> Is anyone aware of such guidelines? And any GNOME-related web interfaces
> as a reference, maybe?

- Alan