From kde-usability Mon Dec 29 18:40:59 2008 From: Stephen Kelly Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:40:59 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: How to join the KDE Usability Team? Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=123057696504366 Celeste Lyn Paul wrote: > On Monday 29 December 2008 09:59:46 am Stephen Kelly wrote: >> Hi, >> >> In an effort to lower the barrier to entry for new and potential >> contributors to KDE, I'm making a few techbase pages to guide people in >> the process of becoming a contributor. >> >> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Contributor_Paths >> >> I want to get help here on finding what the steps are to become a >> contributor to the usability of KDE. What are the entry points? Where are >> the resources? What are the tasks? What is the easy stuff? > > Thanks for starting this. The usability.kde.org website is terribly out > of date and I've been debating on just asking it to redirect to > techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability Great, thanks for the response. I don't know enough about this stuff yet to make this valuable. > > Just for reference, in my mind there are two types of contributors. > Sometimes these can be the same people, but often they are separate > people. > > One, as a developer who is interested in actively improving the usability > of their/any application by making code changes, commiting them and > releasing them. Yes, this is something that would be covered in the 'Creating usable applications' in the Developer path section. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.general/56132/ Also part of 'Creating usable applications' is using designer to make uis. Easier for usability designers to work on that aspect. From the Usability contributor path, we'd have a link to the same page. This is also what I meant by 'Fixing usability issues in code' below. > > Two, as a design who is interested in (not exactly passively, but they are > not a first party) improving the usability of any application by making > recommendations of changes to developers. > >> >> My draft ideas are below >> >> >> >> ***************** >> >> This page is for people who want to improve the usability of KDE. >> >> == Dive in == >> What is the HIG? >> Reviewing KDE apps - What to look for. > Reviewing would be extremely difficult to write guidelines for. The easy > topics are HIG violations, but anything that doesn't have a written > guideline for is > always contested. Unless you are quick with design theory or have a > reputation, recommendations get shot down pretty quickly. > > I would suggest the following sections > > * What is the KDE4 HIG (purpose, goals, link to HIG) > * Writing bugs for KDE HIG violations Cool, that's a good starting point. > >> Using qt designer to fix usability issues. > I don't know what you mean by this. Qt designer doesn't fix usability > issues, but using .ui files makes it easier for designers to assist > developers with coding -- something usually inaccessible to designers. > Designers who are comfortable with an IDE can go in to a .ui file and make > the changes for the developer, and just need a review afterwards. > Sometimes that saves a lot of time for minor changes like alignment and > labelling. Yes, that's what I mean. Using designer it's simple to fix alignment issues etc with results that can be quickly seen with the form preview button, and the resulting file or patch sent to a developer or mailing list. These are fairly low hanging fruit. > >> Fixing usability issues in code. > Same as above, also I think these are mostly HIG issues. > >> Use cases and scenarios >> User research profiles. > > These two things go together. I wish we had a more extensive > description/tutorial written up somewhere. Well, we can call that a gap and plan to fill it. I've been doing some research on the use cases side of things recently. > >> >> == Resources == >> Seeles blog >> HIG >> openusability >> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/Project_User_Research_Template > Books > Lots more beginner websites on UI and Usability > Got some examples or links to the good websites? Or choice picks of the most relevant articles for certain aspects? Thanks for helping, Steve. _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability