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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Usability Strategy Discussion
From:       Irwin K <emerald-arcana () rogers ! com>
Date:       2002-07-02 4:03:06
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On Monday 01 July 2002 04:22 pm, Robert Watkins wrote:

> Exactly! The $64K question is "How do you marry a
> relatively loose process with a relatively formal
> process and still have a workable result?"

You have to teach people the importance of the formal process, and when you do 
that, people who care will use a loose process in a formal manner.

In other words, applied specifically to usability, you teach someone what good 
usability is, why it's important, how you can achieve good usability, and 
then you have people thinking in terms of usability when they start laying 
out components.

One strong way to do this is to let peple on KDE-devel and other -devel lists 
know that a usability project exists in the first place.  The next step is to 
take the existing documentation (like the KDE style guidelines) and update it 
to make something that is easily followed.

I don't know much about the actual development process, but mechanisms such as 
templates and easy-to-use components that encourage usability could be put 
into place to encourage easier GUI's: essentially, if a bad dialog is 
difficult to build, people won't build it.

As the usability team, we have a few responsibilities here:

1) We identify WHAT exactly good usability is, and inform people of the 
general "principles" of good usability, and from those principles, we build 
more strict, more formal guidelines.  (The styleguides for example are a 
starting point; an extension would be "recommendations" such as informing 
people that they shouldn't combine slider bars and scrollbox widgets, or 
encouraging that people use tabs properly, etc.)

2) We have to document these guidelines and recommendations and keep them 
updated.

3) We identify problems in existing user interfaces.  When we identify them, 
we find out why they don't conform to the guidelines.  Ideally, every 
usability problem would have a point in the guideline to follow.  Of course 
we are NOT in an ideal environment.

4) We fix problems in existing user interfaces.

5) We act as consultants to how to better implement user interfaces.  If 
people are interested in usability, they should be able to get answers on how 
to improve their dialog, rather than having to follow philosophical arguments 
about why QToolTip is superior to QTextTip (as a fake example).

There are likely more.  This is rather specific to my experiences in KDE, so 
I'm probably not catching everything.  You'll also notice that I don't have 
any "hows" either... I'll think and write more of those later. 

-- 
-- Arcana  (Irwin)
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