This message brings together several different threads on moving GNOME HIG forward, most notably the recent posts to this mailing list by Brian Cameron and Calum Benson. It contains the summarised outcomes of discussions with Karl Lattimer, Calum Benson and Brian Cameron.
The overarching proposal is to update the GNOME usability project and associated tools for the delivery of modern, simple and easily applicable usability research and guidelines. This would assist in making FOSS desktop technology more productive for normal users and more accessible to those with disabilities. The outcomes of this activity would directly support the development and launch of GNOME 3 and would also be freely available to other projects in the FOSS eco-system through share-alike licensing. Projects could directly adopt or customize the tools to fit individual requirements, and benefit from the support structures of the global GNOME community. To realize this requires four key activities. (Activity 1) Update and improve the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines explain how to create applications that look right, behave properly, and fit into the GNOME user interface as a whole. Both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements and the philosophy and general design principles behind the GNOME interface are covered. These guidelines are currently at version 2.2 and have not been substantially updated for several years. While they were useful as a resource to bring usability to the fore on the GNOME project, they are now a large collection of style, interaction, and experience information. Topics include spacing guidelines, icon guidelines, dialog layout, language guidelines, shortcut key conventions, menu item conventions, input interaction and detailed information on the placement, usage and application of each widget. The current document covers too much ground in a hard to parse fashion, so most software engineers don't to take time to read and apply the material. We propose to update the guidelines by creating two documents for practical application of usability guidelines, and to retain any additional information in a separate reference book. (1) The first document would be style guidelines that contain a gallery of window layouts and their relevant applications, padding/spacing and framing, alignments, icon guidelines and generally anything in the "GNOME Style Guidelines" category. This document underpin UI design in GNOME applications and would have an overview of things that UI designers can do to ensure consistent look and feel. The format would be a pattern library as it allows a library of common widget arrangements matched with a task and applicability. A developer could say that 'My application needs to browse a series of folders to populate the main view' and get information suggesting that s/he uses a sidebar and how this is applied. In practice the document would be a semantic data store to allow a developer to think "x app is similar to mine in this respect", and then find all of the patterns related to that app. The pattern would potentially be a two-tier system, one being an immutable set of core patterns/guidelines that are provided by the HIG team considers stable and the other an unstable or pending set that's open to contributions from GNOME users/developers. The latter may be moved into the stable set over time. The patterns could furthermore be cross-linked to a simple coding examples library. Anyone could contribute to fulfill the requirements of the example, and people could translate those examples into various languages. (2) The second document would be user experience guidelines detailing the kind of language that should be used for error messages, usage of widgets/controls, input interaction, default shortcuts and anything else which becomes UX relevant. This would be more of a traditional document in format, and could probably be substantially created from the existing HIG. These two documents will allow developers to make sure everything is simple and effective from a user's perspective. Any remaining information would be collected into the secondary resource book. With this structure the revised GNOME Human Interface Guidelines could act as: - A standard-bearing community HIG providing tools for the current requirements and recent developments like network integration and multiple platform applicability (desktop, mobile etc); - A framework to unify and focus corporate investment in usability throughout the GNOME eco-system on the primary project rather than on customized products; - A holistic approach to usability in the eco-system at large and be fully adaptable by other projects under share-alike licensing. (Activity 2) Establish a GNOME Foundation Mobile Usability Lab The goal is to establish a lab that provides equipment for use at various conferences, events, or hackfests when there is a need to do a usability study. This project would allow experts to conduct a usability study and document how it is done, so other projects can follow a template. It would act as an enabler for the GNOME community (and the broader FOSS community) to learn how to apply the Human Interface Guidelines. This lab would be a long- term outcome alongside the GNOME HIG, and would travel with usability project representatives to FOSS conferences around the world for GNOME-specific usability, for general FOSS demonstrations and to directly assist other FOSS projects with practical usability testing. (Activity 3) Create a new way for GNOME to collect Usability Data The collection and analysis of usability data needs to be improved to allow real-world experiences to feed back into revisions of the Human Interface Guidelines and into application development. There are three key aspects to this: allowing GNOME users to provide more usability data, doing usability studies in a remote fashion, and storing usability data so it is useful. Methods to get more effective usability data might include things like encouraging developers to test paper prototypes with users, instrumenting development builds of software, or devising self-administered usability tests where users run through tasks that are provided in an email or on a website, and either record themselves doing it and/or fill in a questionnaire afterwards. The Mobile Usability Lab would allow testing of ideas to find the best one for the GNOME eco-system. (Activity 4) Build a community for Ongoing Usability The revised HIG, Mobile Usability Lab and processes to collect better usability data are naturally maintained, advocated and enhanced by the GNOME usability project. The launch of the new tools and processes would provide an excellent opportunity to update that project itself to ensure that the usability community in the project makes best use of the tools and available human resources. A key part of this is improving the GNOME usability wiki to make it easier for people to get involved and contribute towards the development of usability personas, doing paper prototyping and other activities like card sorting. This community would provide a framework for deploying the HIG, the Mobile Usability Lab, and for processing usability data and incoming questions. What do you think? Regards Shane -- Shane Coughlan Business and Technology Consultant Opendawn sh...@opendawn.com Phone: +81 (0) 909 7742404 / Fax: +81 (0) 878890288 www.opendawn.com _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
