December « 2004 « tigert.com

30Dec/04Off

Usability, Interface Guidelines and beyond

This has been a very interesting year work-wise. The birth of the "product design" team at Novell lead by Anna and sparked by Nat has been one of the eye openers in how I see my work and skills.

Basically what has happened is a transformation from "The guy who draws pretty icons" to a hopefully wider understanding of usability, guidelines and what this is all about. And the realization that we dont actually know that much yet. This stuff seems to take a fair bit of time to really "sink it in".

Basically the challenge is this: We have the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines which is a good resource. By looking at mailing list discussions, comments and development, it is great that the developer community has understood the importance of guidelines - Robert was even flamed for creating "non-hig" dialogs because he happened to use slightly wrong spacing in his device settings dialog once.. This is good -- following the HIG results in clean looking, consistent software. But what has struck me is that usability is a lot more than clean looking dialogs. It is not enough to just check that all the widgets use correct spacing, the tables and forms are aligned correctly and that the stuff is consistent looking. The question is: does my program actually make sense? Does it solve a problem in a useful way? The HIG is a good help here, but it is just a reference to use in the design process.

I guess there will be more on this front in the future, so stay tuned

Robert: I really first read "..a year of pain.." here..

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29Dec/04Off

Asian tragedy

It's been horrible to watch the news unfold, the death toll constantly increasing.. 12000.. 20000.. 60000.. Over two hundred finnish tourists are still missing, plus all the other nationalities, and the local people.. And looking at the news and pictures, it just starts to look like not many of the missing ones ever return..

If you saw, www.apple.com is dedicated to the tragedy today and contains several links if you want to donate to the rescue effort, it's worth a look. Or your local Red Cross website probably has also more information.

I never expected to have this much contrast between this and the merry christmas post..

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24Dec/04Off

Look, no chocolate box picture!

And hey everybody, like the BBC lady said this week on radio: Despite the risk of potentially offending millions of people, Merry Christmas!

I am not wishing happy new year just yet, since given the current trend, I might even update this site still before the end of the year. Thanks to everyone who visited, and I wish you all well, no matter what name you might have for this holiday season

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7Dec/04Off

Gnome Startup Notifications..

To continue the ever-increasing trend of chatting via Planet Gnome, here's a comment to Bryan's nice program startup notification concept.

Bryan, I like the idea a lot, but I think in this case it should not be used when you start up an application from the menus, but instead for the case when you minimize the application window. That would make it more logical in my opinion, since you do not start programs to run in the bottom bar, they start into actual application windows.

I think the windows/mac "fade out (or blink) the menu with the chosen menu entry fading out a bit slower" might work nicely for starting though.