"hacking the social system"

[Carlos Leonhard Woelz]

On Wed, 04 May 2005 13:09:49 -0700, "James Richard Tyrer"
<tyrerj at acm.org> said:

> How we want this behavior to change is also up for discussion.  I would 
> like them to have their work conform to the UI guidelines and for them 
> to be more concerned with usability, but others probably have other
> ideas.

The quality initiative is nothing more than an attempt try to "hack the
social system", as you put it. I welcome this discussion :)

You already know my take: one great way to convince other developers to
do something is to spend some time with "their" applications. People
will know you better, and react to your ideas. (That is one of the
reasons why it is easier to fix the whole of smaller part of KDE then to
try to fix the a smaller part of the whole). For instance, I found that
developers are very easily persuaded to fix something (simple) while you
are writing the documentation for "their" application.

In my personal experience, maintaining a quality wiki page for the app /
module you want to improve helps. There is always so much to do, and you
get a better idea of what is missing by collecting all loose ends in one
page. You may find out that the greatest priority isn't your bug report
after all :) Example:

http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=Quality+team+KDE+PIM

(BTW, I hope to resume my activities with kdepim, as soon as I update
the quality pages for SVN).

While maintaining the page, I got some leverage from other people with
some of the tasks, and had fun. Other developers could see what I was
working on, and were very, very responsive. In other words, I recommend
it as a way to "hack the social system" and make KDE better.

I didn't try to do a ui guidelines review yet, but I think most
developers will welcome one. I would recommend doing a very
comprehensive review, including a shortcut keys coherency and
accessibility review, a *general* (not one specific item) KDE User
Interface Guidelines conformance review, etc... The OpenUsability effort
gets great feedback from developers because people respect the hard work
put into a detailed review. FGor ideas, see:

http://quality.kde.org/develop/howto/howtoui.php

Cheers,

Carlos Woelz
-- 
  Carlos Leonhard Woelz
  carloswoelz at imap-mail.com