Re: [Usability] User Experience Advocates

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

On 14 May 2010, at 05:03, Kirk Bridger wrote:

> Interesting idea, it introduces the idea of accountability which I think is lacking in many ways right now with Gnome Usability.  But then the flip side of accountability is the ability to make changes.
> 
> Which leads to a question and a point.
> 
> Question: why did this not take off earlier Callum?

Hmm, a bunch of different reasons really, but overall, I think we never quite achieved a critical mass of UI folks who could spend enough time with individual projects, and the rest of us just didn't organise ourselves well enough.

The closest we ever really came to any semi-formal involvement with devs was the UI reviews we did on IRC for a while after feature freeze of each major GNOME release. Some issues with those were:

* by definition, they were done pretty much at the last minute -- the app may not have had any other input from UI folks until it was about to be released.

* the choice of projects to review was pretty random -- usually just if a dev asked for one.

* the reviews were done 'live' on IRC, without so much as a shared VNC session of the application in question to look at.  Since not everybody in attendance would even have the same version of the application available to them, or the devs would have locally-patched versions to ask about, people would usually end up posting screenshots of things as we went along, which wasn't ideal.

* it was rare that anyone (from the Usability Project side) had done much preparation -- we all just turned up and hoped we'd be able to spot issues and make good recommendations as we went along.

As a result, I don't think we ever properly finished reviewing a single application at those meetings.  We certainly have better tools at our disposal nowadays for doing collaborative UI reviews, and I'm sure we can instigate a better process than one-off, unprepared, end-of-cycle reviews.

> Point: We can plan all we want as uxperts, but what do the devs think of the idea?  Are they interested in taking UX advice from one person?  The question of trust and experience came up at the UX Hackfest in London and I haven't heard much since then.  If I were assigned to Anjuta for example, would the Anjuta team be interested in listening to my ideas?  Is there an interview process, or some credentialing?

Well, one good thing about the GNOME UI Reviews we did was that the process (if you could call it that) had the backing of the release team -- if we said a UI issue in a particular app had to be fixed before release, and it wasn't, then that app wouldn't get released.  Obviously with that sort of power comes the potential risk of becoming 'usability nazis', but it never came to that -- everyone was quite happy to fix the things we suggested, not least because it was usually they who had asked for the review in the first place.

IMHO the Sun process I mentioned in my last email worked best when the projects came to us for advice too, so perhaps that's the key to success -- if we keep it voluntary, people are more likely to accept our advice, which leads to positive results, which leads to more/bigger projects asking for our assistance next time.  Maybe :)

> One other thought - how does this intercept with some of the ideas at OpenUsability.org?

I haven't looked over there for a while, but it's certainly worth investigating whether we could leverage what they're doing, or at least make use of their infrastructure.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation, Ireland
mailto:calum benson oracle com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.