Re: [Usability] Prototyping the next generation panel

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 4 Nov 2008, at 10:01, Allan Day wrote:

> Been thinking about this some more...
>
> > I'd certainly support prototyping this stuff sooner rather than later
> > as well--
>
> One problem with these designs is their scope. We're not talking about
> individual apps, here. We're talking about the whole desktop. How do  
> you
> prototype that?!

Nobody said it would be easy :)  Microsoft and Apple have teams of  
dozens spending fortunes on doing this sort of stuff all the time, and  
they still manage to get it pretty wrong sometimes.

You say we're talking about the "whole desktop", but really that's  
only true in a visual sense.  Most of us spend far more time working  
in individual applications than interacting with "the desktop", which  
is primarily just a tool to help us organise and prioritise what we're  
doing in those other applications.  As such, it hopefully shouldn't be  
too hard to break down the desktop functionality into a manageable  
number of goals and tasks, on which we can focus during any initial  
prototyping activities.

(By goals I mean things like "email a photo to your parents", and by  
tasks, the implementation-agnostic steps required: "connect your  
camera to your computer", "find the right photo", "attach it to a new  
email", "add a comment", "send the email to your parents".)

Obviously some of these goals and tasks will have a wider scope than  
*just* the desktop/panel/wm-- and that's no bad thing, because it  
means we can re-use them when we're prototyping other parts of the  
desktop experience.  While we're concentrating on just the desktop/ 
panel, though, to some extent we can treat the inputs and outputs to  
the non-desktop/panel tasks as clouds where 'the right thing  
happens'.  (Although in some cases, it may certainly be interesting to  
ask users what they think 'the right thing' should be.)

To identify these goals and tasks, we ideally want some of that user  
research done-- that should also help us document some actual user  
requirements, without which it's going to be pretty hard to design  
anything useful anyway.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems