I had a chance to preview this with the
Requirements Council. They had a similar reaction. Loved the peer review opportunities,
some concern over making things mandatory.
In particular the UI Polish Review being
mandatory felt like a bit of check box release activity to them. Not much
resistance to the post mortem and the visibility it would trigger.
I will make a point of presenting these
view points and any discussion on this thread when this is presented to the
Planning Council.
From:
ui-best-practices-working-group-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ui-best-practices-working-group-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kevin McGuire
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006
12:06 PM
To: User
Interface Best Practices Working Group
Subject: Re:
[ui-best-practices-working-group] UI Best Practices Working GroupProposal to
the Planning Council (Draft)
Hi all,
The
activities listed (UI Post-Mortem, Show and Tell, Polish Review) are good
practices for any group to follow. Its great for us to document them and
provide direction. We need however to provide more written motivation on
why they are worth spending time on.
The
issue I am struggling with though is whether or not the UI Post-Mortem and
Polish Review should be made mandatory as the wording presently recommends.
Either
a team cares about usability and UI polish, or they do not. If they do,
but they are having difficulty achieving this goal, then the Working Group can
provide guidance in the forms of best practices (such as those below) and
informal peer review/feedback. Up until now there has not been a forum
for discussing UI issues in Eclipse. In this case the role of the Working
Group as a peer group is quite clear to me and good. The number of people
already on the call suggests that the interest and motivation is there.
If
they do not care, then making the steps mandatory is only an administrative
annoyance which will likely be checked off in the most efficient manner. A
review alone will not provide quality, either because the review itself may not
be done particularly well, or because the few items it brings forth may never
be acted on. You can't mandate caring.
Not
only will these steps not necessarily produce usable quality UIs, but the
contrary is also true: good UIs can be produced without following these steps. In
WebSphere Integration Developer, we never did a formal UI Post-Mortem as
outlined, nor a formal UI Polish Review). We nevertheless achieved high
degrees of usability, finesse, and innovation by making UI quality central to
the tooling team's thoughts, with design and review occurring constantly
throughout the iterative cycle. IMHO this is the best way to address UI
issues, by baking it into what is done on a daily basis. By contrast, the
recommended mandatory steps only address two phases in the development: the
end-game (where frankly only surface usability issues can be addressed) and
planning. A good start certainly, but not the whole story.
I
think that raising awareness around UI quality is a great role for the Working
Group. In that sense, I can understand the motivation for making these
steps mandatory. And I can see that by making the outcome public,
visibility and thus pressure is put on the groups to improve their usability. I
am uncomfortable with them being rules, but perhaps that's just my personality
<grin>.
I
believe this issue of creating mandatory process steps is central to what we
believe the role of the Working Group is. I missed the first half of our
last call so maybe I just missed out on this discussion.
Cheers,
Kevin
McGuire
Eclipse
UI Guy
|
"Bob Fraser"
<bfraser@xxxxxxx>
Sent
by: ui-best-practices-working-group-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
10/06/2006 06:25 PM
|
Please
respond to
User Interface Architecture Working Group
|
|
|
To
|
"User
Interface Best Practices Working Group"
<ui-best-practices-working-group@xxxxxxxxxxx>
|
|
cc
|
|
|
Subject
|
[ui-best-practices-working-group] UI Best
Practices Working Group Proposal to the Planning
Council (Draft)
|
|
Here is a draft of the proposal to the planning council. Comments
welcome.
The
Eclipse User Interface Best Practices Working Group
wishes to make a proposal to the Eclipse Planning Council to encourage the
participation of the project groups in the activities of the working group.
We believe this will improve the usability and user experience in and
across the projects making up the simultaneous release.
Background:
The EMO was instructed by the Board to facilitate the creation of a working group
to focus on usability and UI in Eclipse. This has happened and the User Interface Best Practices Working Group has the
charter to help improve the usability across the Eclipse projects that are part
of the simultaneous release effort. In addition to updating the Eclipse User
Interface Guidelines, the group will also participate in and facilitate the
following activities to improve the user interface experience:
- Trigger usability post-mortems to be performed
by the different projects
- Conduct regular "show and tells" with
UI leads from the projects to shed spotlight on problem areas and promote
good ideas as best practices
- Do an end of release UI review and come up with
a cross-project list of polish items
The
wiki for the working group can be found at: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/User_Interface_Best_Practices_Working_Group
And a
detailed description of the activities can be found at:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/User_Interface_Best_Practices_Working_Group_Charter_Related_Activities
Proposal:
The User Interface Best Practices Working Group
wishes to propose the following items:
- The group requests that the Planning Council
makes the output of the usability post-mortems a requirement for
participation in the simultaneous release. Specifically, that the
projects shall hold usability post-mortems and a prioritized list of
usability issues to be addressed shall be posted on the project wiki.
- The group requests that the Planning Council
recommends that the projects participate in UI show and tells with the
goal of sharing information on UI best practices and challenges.
- The group requests that the Planning Council
makes the output of the UI Polish Review a part of the release exit
criteria. Specifically, that the projects shall hold UI Polish Reviews and
a final fix list shall be posted on the project wiki.
We
thank your consideration of this matter.
_______________________________________________________________________
Notice: This email message, together with
any attachments, may contain
information of BEA Systems,
Inc., its subsidiaries and affiliated
entities, that may be confidential,
proprietary, copyrighted and/or
legally privileged, and is intended solely for the
use of the individual
or entity named in this message. If you are not
the intended recipient,
and have received this message in error, please
immediately return this
by email and then delete it.
_______________________________________________
ui-best-practices-working-group mailing list
ui-best-practices-working-group@xxxxxxxxxxx
https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/ui-best-practices-working-group
