Re: [Usability] Ideas for Usability Hackfest

[Máirín Duffy <mairin linuxgrrl com>]

Hi Calum!

On 10/01/2009 12:32 PM, Calum Benson wrote:
> (1) Style guidelines that contain a gallery of window layouts and their
> relevant applications, padding/spacing and framing, alignments, icon
> guidelines and generally anything which is "GNOME Style Guidelines"
> worthy. This document becomes the main Bible of UI design for GNOME
> applications. It has an overview of simple things that UI designers can
> do to ensure a consistent look and feel with GNOME.
>
> A pattern library would be ideal, as I understand it what you'd be
> expecting here is a library of common widget arrangements matched with a
> task and applicability, for instance; 'My application needs to browse a
> series of folders to populate the main view' - Use a sidebar, this is
> how ... dum de dum ... The problem with these kinds of libraries is
> browsability, a semantic data store could work in the following way;

It didn't seem to be mentioned in your summary so I wanted to bring it 
up - in working with developers writing UIs for GNOME, one resource that 
some had not even heard of but found very useful is the 'gtk-demo' app. 
It has running demo apps that show the usage of various widgets in GTK+, 
their source code, and some brief remarks about them.

It might be cool to build in some more user experience centric 
documentation right within the little demo app to talk about what kinds 
of data sets are best represented with this widget, which are not 
well-represented with it, and maybe provide the demos in a 
pattern-centric style navigation than a widget-centric navigation.

(Does that make sense?)

I was thinking, if it's not a document but is more interactive like 
gtk-demo, developers may be more likely to read it than a doc.

~m