[kde-guidelines] Goal of the HIG

[Philipp Stefan]

Hello everyone,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to voice my concern as I want to 
discuss our general approach to to HIGs.
Important disclaimer: I don't want to criticize anyone here. You are all 
some doing important work and I'm confident that we can bring KDE 
Software forward. Also, this applies not to all HIGs, like the layout 
patterns etc.

I like this proposal, I think it includes everything that needs to be 
said and a bit more. My concern is, however, that we create more and 
more guidelines for the developers to read. I fear that we increase the 
load of the developers instead of easing it. Yes, we write guidelines, 
but we have more and more guidelines for them to read. We can, of 
course, keep the guidelines as short as possible, but that won't help us 
much as long as we create ever more of them. Another thing we have to 
work against is that KDE doesn't have long standing history of high 
quality usability design. This kind of quality is also a learned skill, 
and I think we are not there yet.
Another point why other platform have good designed applications is IMHO 
that they try to take as much weigh off the developers.
Of course all the HIGs are work in progress and always in a state of 
change, but I think we really should focus more on making guides and not 
just guidelines. I think we should make a guide that shows step by step 
how make a good designed, integrated Application. The guide should cover 
everything from point 1 of basic considerations over wording and 
animations to integrating into Plasma in a linear way. Of course we can 
always reorganize the HIGs in a way to fit this ideal or write such a 
guide, but I think we have to keep this concept in mind to come up with 
something that really helps developers.
The way we currently organize things is a bit overwhelming for me 
personally. There is no way to progress through the Usability HIGs 
without having the page opened and open new tabs. It really resembles 
the Wikipedia style much more than it does resemble a guide you'd find 
in a book (which is what I think we should strive for).

Another big thing is that we leave much to the developers which then 
balloons up our guidelines. I think ideally we'd have a e.g. pre-made 
search widget with a predefined behaviour so that we only have to tell 
developers how to feed it with information and where in the application 
to integrate it.
I think the "putt the button here, the icon there and it should behave 
this way" approach has failed us before. Personally I think that design 
guidelines and design patterns should not be as separated as they 
currently are. Take animations for example (I know it isn't finished 
yet, great work btw! :), I don't think we should tell developers how to 
animate certain widgets. Their behaviour should be as pre-defined as 
possible, so that we only have to give them general guidelines, with 
examples of DOs and DON'Ts.


I'm sorry if this doesn't sound too coherent, but I have problems 
thinking clearly right now. Anyway, I hope you get what I mean. I don't 
think what we're doing is wrong, but I think it could be improved when 
we would approach our work a bit differently. Naturally this won't 
happen in this or next cycle. To say it cynically, throwing a bunch of 
text at people won't change much.

Phil