From:
eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David
M Williams
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 8:05 AM
To: eclipse.org-planning-council
Subject: [eclipse.org-planning-council] Eclipse User Interface
Guidelines and UI Checklist
> > 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.