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

[Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>]

Am Sonntag, den 12.06.2005, 15:45 +0100 schrieb Alan Horkan:
> 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/

I'll try, nobody seems to be in the mentioned IRC channel though. I'll
try the mailing list later if nobody shows up.

> > 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.

I am aware that plenty of web usability information is available on the
web, but I was more interested in guidelines for consistency rather than
plain ease of use.

> 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).

Actually, I am not planning to use JS, mainly for a11y reasons. But I
don't want to get too hung up in a discussion about whether or not tree
views are a good thing; IMO it's just a matter of preference. I
personally like to have a global picture and a treeview can give me
that. That said, if there were a GNOME guideline not to use such widgets
I'd probably try to follow it.
It is probably also the case that there are completely different design
reasons behind an informational website and a web application.

> > 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.

I tend to disagree again, but let's just ignore that ;).

Thanks,
-Samuel