Re: [Usability] Moving forward: (Activity 1) Update and improve the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

[Karl Lattimer <karl lattimer codethink co uk>]

On Fri, 2009-10-09 at 10:42 +0900, Shane Martin Coughlan wrote:
> Hi Calum, Karl

Hi Shane,

> We recently talked about how the HIG can be updated by moving towards a 
> pattern library style (summary below for people new to the thread).  It 
> appears that feedback about proposal has been positive.  
> 
> That's cool.  In my opinion the pattern library update sounds awesome and I 
> want to see it happen.  Gnome has a great opportunity to provide some landmark 
> FOSS guidelines for modern computing.
> 
> I'd like to discuss how all this stuff can be made a reality with our current 
> resources.  As I understand it these are as follows:
>  - At least two professional usability chaps (that's you)
>  - A big existing HIG
>  - A bunch of volunteers who care on this list
>  - A website/wiki
>  - A deadline of March 2010 to meet the Gnome 3 release
> 
> Putting the bits together, and to assist with discussions in Boston:
>  - Given the above resources how realistic is a March 2010 deployment?
>  - How many hours (ballpark) can you commit to this adventure?
>  - What type of stuff should volunteers do (a) right now and (b) in one to two 
> months to support the development of the new HIG?
>  - Are there are dos and don'ts or gotchas that tend to hobble HIG development 
> that we need to avoid?

As I'm not making it to Boston, I'd like some things brought up; 

Firstly, my initial focus will be to digest the HIG, reducing it down,
to something which covers most topics broadly and in few pages. I can do
this on live.gnome.org. I think this can be achieved in about a days
worth of work. Which I can provide at some point in the near future. 

What would be helpful to me is if at boston people could spend the time
in a group identifying areas of over specification, e.g. duplication,
unnecessary detail etc... and also identifying key areas which they feel
must remain even in the HIG-lite.

Regarding the implementation of the pattern library, I haven't paid
attention enough and am not sure what's powering library.gnome.org, it
appears that it's maybe a drupal book? If so, then it's possible to
build a set of semantic relationships between book pages somehow (Sam
Taylor was showing me something like this on wine-doors.org a while
back). This would allow us to implement the graph of links discussed in
the original post. 

Does anyone want to do the investigation into this side of
implementation?

The next thing I wanted to bring up is a killer feature, it would be
absolutely awesome, is if we could make notes along side the pages of
the book, and have those notes attributed to author, time/date and point
to a specific section. Sharing notes in GNOME documentation would save a
lot of discussion time :)

This might be a little off-topic, but I wanted to mention it.

> An ancillary section could be code snippets.  It could be cross-linked rather 
> than incorporated it into the pattern library itself. A simple coding
> examples library would be a benefit in itself, in there we can have
> anyone contribute an example to fulfil the requirements of the example,
> and people could translate those examples into various languages.

Obviously including the annotation feature in a code example library
would also be cool.

BR,
 K