[eclipse.org-planning-council] Eclipse User Interface Guidelines and UI

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > What was the decision with respect to enforcing
these UI guidelines for
> > projects included in Ganymede?

> So I guess to answer Mike's question, we really
haven't made a 
> decision on how to proceed with this yet. From what I remember of
> the discussion we kinda got overwelmed by the weight of the details
> and it fizzled out.

I remember it differently. Though end result is similar.


I recall we explicitly decided not to even consider
having any UI-checklist-like requirement for Ganymede, since the spec wasn't
done at our last meeting, (hence, how could we even decide) and given that
the UI group itself said the checklist they had then was not so much for
"compliance checking" as it was for for "best practices"
-- then it seemed especially unlikely there could ever possibly be anything
that could be _required_ of Projects. 

At that meeting Bob committed that they would work
on having a new, separate list more suitable for compliance checking, I
guess that's what this list is? But ... it would require a whole new review
and discussion, and doubt there's time to realistically expect a "must
do". 

There was also a concern that UI checklists would
not lead to increased usability, it's a necessary part, but not sufficient,
and, we feared, was a small part of the harder question of "do these
components work well together?". 

We did acknowledge, however, that the user community
could certainly open bugs if a UI "did not meet guidelines" and
these bugs would be valid and prioritized along with any other bugs reported.


And, I believe, we Projects hope there is a lot of
community scrutiny of these guidelines and our implementation of them.
Anything that can be done to encourage the community of end users to apply
that scrutiny would be helpful, I think.  How about "I love UI
bugs" t-shirts?  :) 

Oh, and we did, however, invent a new whole new category
for UI issues -- "encouraged". See 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Ganymede

= = = = 
Encouraged

We added a third, even weaker, category of recommendations:
1.        Should participate in a User Interface Best Practices Working Group UI walkthrough.
= = = =


So ... not the same as "fizzled out" ... but, no concrete actions dictated.