Re: [Usability] UI review as well as code review (r+/r-)

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 15 Dec 2009, at 10:15, James Moschou wrote:

> My idea is that before committing any changes to UI, GNOME developers
> need some sort of central infrastructure (mailing list, bugzilla?)
> where they submit their design for approval and a GNOME-wide committee
> would r+ it before it gets committed. I'm not talking about "design by
> committee" btw which doesn't work, just a bunch of people, probably
> from this mailing list, who are trained in the HIG etc. and are able
> to make such decisions and offer improvements, much like how code
> review works. My point is that this team will be reviewing UI, not
> actually doing it themselves, that's still the developer's job.

We kind of used to do that, although admittedly too late in the dev cycle.  We used to hold GNOME UI reviews on IRC prior to each major release, after feature freeze.  They sort of did what they set out to do, but as with any review on IRC, it was inevitably hard to keep things focused, and we rarely completed reviews of everything we'd intended to.

(Part of the reason we did it that way was due to lack of usability resources to do things the way we really wanted to: by having a centralized pool of usability people who could act as 'consultants' to individual projects.)

> I think this is needed because the HIG, while helpful, is quite brief

That's a first -- most people complain it's too big :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems