An aid for usability development

[Frans Englich]

Some lunatic have ranted about usability on Newsforge:

http://programming.newsforge.com/programming/04/07/07/1640244.shtml?tid=25&tid=26&tid=2&tid=31

Funny, what he thinks needs to be done for usability to improve in KDE, is 
exactly what I have been doing lately.

More specifically, I have been working on a concept dubbed KDE Usability 
Articles, a framework for documenting usability aspects in applications, 
general usability facts/principles, and for tackling problems specific for 
open source development.
A more elaborated description is found in "kua1" in the attached tarball, 
which I recommend is read. In a nutshell, the KUA concept is a 
combination between a library and a "KDE-official RFC-like standard body". We 
can use it to learn about usability, and as guidelines to in the usual way 
smack people with. In addition, I have written a couple of KUAs, an overview 
is available in the file "TOC". Most of the content is written from my 
experience, tailored for the problems KDE has.
Practically, my idea is to implement it as a section on usability.kde.org, 
with docbook as the underlying framework.

I (currently) consider /most/ of the articles feature complete, although all 
of them are rough and needs heavy editing(cutting and removal) and of course, 
correction of all false statements and errors they without doubt contains. 
They are too many to review at once, but as soon the website is up, we can 
systematically review them one by one; rewrite, delete, extend, and write new 
articles.
I can think of many questions concerning this, I will gladly try to answer 
them as they come.

Unless someone have strong objections on the concept in itself, I will rig up 
a section on usability.kde.org, and we can then continue from there.


		Frans


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