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GNOME Human Interface Guidelines Released

Posted by timothy on from the not-just-for-housepets-any-more dept.

Seth Nickell writes: "We are proud to announce the release of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines v1.0, the product of usability engineers, designers, hackers, and whatever-keeps-you-writing-calum irish wine[TM]. I hope they'll be useful for improving the usefulness of all free software, not just GNOME apps. Check out the release announcement for details and a plaintive plea for interface coordination between free software projects." (Also at the top of the new Gnome news site called Footnotes.)

5 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Too little, too late by PhysicsGenius · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The Open Source community lambasts Microsoft for making security an add-on "feature" instead of engineering it into the lowest, most fundamental levels of the product. We know (and apparently they don't) that security is about more than slapping a lock on the outside and calling it safe. You have to think of protocols, transactions, etc and every stage and with all contingencies in mind.

    UI design is the same way and apparently no one in the Linux/UNIX world understands this. You can't make a program intuitive to use by programming it willy-nilly and then putting the right-sized buttons or icons of the correct 16-bit colors on the top. Ease-of-use must be factored in on Day One.

    That's why it saddens me to seen GNOME come out with their UI design guidelines fully 4 years after they started programming and after at least two major releases.

    If UI design bugs (costing thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars via confusion and "human" error) got the same press that MS's security problems did, ZDNet would have the same biased field days that Slashdot enjoys on a monthly basis.

    1. Re:Too little, too late by RevAaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No one ever claimed that GNOME isn't useful. Not having well designed UI guidelines doesn't make GNOME useless, it just makes it inconsistent at best, and nearly impossible to use at worse. Which it is, unfortunately. Windows is also quite inconsistent, even though they've had design guidelines for a while. But like with GNOME, they were put out as an afterthought.

      I'm not much of a fan of Windows, and I don't use it very often, but it's still more consistent than GNOME. (I use Linux at home and work) Maybe in another 6 years GNOME will achieve the same level of consistency that Windows has now, after the same normalizing process that occured with Windows does with GNOME. Windows is still less consistent than some other options, but it's catching up, no doubt because the HIG were put out.

      False that it necessarily follows that the GUIs for Gnome/KDE/Windowmaker are therefore costing us money.

      They are. They waste time, and as the adage does, time is money. When I'm at work, that 20 minutes a day I have to spend trying to figure out those inconsistent GNOME apps costs me 20 minutes where I could have been doing real work. Maybe your time is worth nothing, but a lot of us have more to do than dick around with poorly designed GNOME apps.

      The Mac OS and the Newton OS are two examples where design guidelines were developed with the OS/GUI system and made available to developers from very early on. It's not surprising that they're the most consistent computing platforms around.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  2. Re:Bad Buttons by foobar104 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "Dismiss" is a better name for the single button, though "Close" is probably a little less idiomatic.

    No, it isn't. Remember the part about using the user's vocabulary. What if I walked into your office and said, "The vending machine is out of Spritz." You'd acknowledge my announcement by saying, "Okay." You might not care that the vending machine is out of Spritz. On the other hand, you might be terribly disappointed and upset. But in either case, the correct response is simply, "Okay," as in, "I acknowledge this message."

    Don't read too much into it. The "OK" button isn't meant to imply approval on the part of the user. It means the same thing "Okay" means in speech. It means, more or less, "I hear you."

    Always putting the "human" back in "human interface."

  3. Re:Bad Buttons by Arandir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Somehow I have a hard time believing that a bunch of developers who say "we won't follow any sensible UI design until we get mandatory guidelines" are the sort of people that would follow the guidelines to begin with.

    What GNOME really needs is a release manager with the cojones to kick out anything that doesn't follow the standards.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  4. personal gripe: useless ABOUT boxes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Gnome

    I have not read the whole thing yet, but I don't see anything about ABOUT boxes in these guidelines. There are some programs which handle the ABOUT box well. I am not complaining about those :)

    Instead, I am complaining about programs which use their ABOUT box to do nothing but show a pretty logo, the name of the program and (sometimes but not always) the name of the creator. That doesn't really give me much information to go on. If I said "Tell me about your hometown" and you mumbled that it was on earth while gesturing indifferently toward a picture postcard tacked to a telephone pole across town ... I would conclude you had not done much ABOUTing at all.

    When I choose "ABOUT" from a menu (And what silly convention puts this under "HELP"? Oh well, I think that one is too late to change ;)), the things I hope I will learn are:

    - What is the Name / Version of the software I'm running?

    - What is the purpose of the software? [I wish the Mozilla ABOUT box mentioned that one could use Mozilla to interact with and create Web pages,read and send email, and chat on IRC ...]

    - Who wrote it / sponsored it, and how can I track them down to give them money?

    - Was it formerly known under a different name?

    - When was it written? (Version number alone may be useful if you already know what you're looking for, but the information that a program was written in September of 2001 might mean more.)

    - What are the terms of redistribution?

    - Is there a web page somewhere with tutorials etc on the software?

    - Even better would be local files accessable from the ABOUT screen with things like tutorials, errata, a reasonable-sized FAQ ...

    Note: Both KDE and GNOME "official" programs tend to do these things relatively well -- this is a bitch aimed at *other* programs, esp. those made by people who might just now be reading with interest the GNOME guidelines :) Some of the worst offenders are among commerical products.

    And of course, the odd easter egg is nice too :)

    timothy