Usability Meeting at Fosdem re review:103811

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

On 06/02/12 00:54, David Edmundson wrote:
>   - DrDanz's girlfriend (sorry, my mind has gone blank :-S )

Maddalena


>   - Some really nice guy from Open Usability (whose name I have no idea
> how to spell.)

Björn (I think... sorry if it is wrong)


>   - The icon should _not_ be the same as the contact list as that would
> be confusing.

We should contact the artistic team and request a set of icons, one for 
each component "normal" status and one for the "attention" status. Icons 
should, in my opinion, have something in common, so that it is clear 
that the icon belongs to "KDE IM" but should be different for each 
component.
There was a page for the icons somewhere, some time ago, anyone 
remembers the address?


>   - One proposed suggestion was to have a new tab button that shows a
> list of contacts.
> (I am /massively/ against this, as it goes against the entire modular
> approach we've been working towards)

I am not in favour but neither completely against this... It might have 
sense to have a button that opens a dialog (perhaps using the grid 
widget filtering on online people with text capabilities) and requests a 
new chat channel.
Modular approach means that you can replace any component with some 
other component that better fits your needs, and text ui might be fit 
the needs of some users better than the contact list. Moreover it 
already allows you to start file transfers, call, video, desktop 
sharing, etc, so I don't see any reason why we shouldn't allow to start 
a new chat.



> One of the things constantly repeated at the conference in the design
> talk is there is no "right and wrong" design, only constant itteration
> improving - This has different parts from both the arguments in the
> original discussion, which shows progress.
>
> I'm a teeny bit of a skeptic about all of these, as I never noticed
> anything "wrong" with what was there before and I use chat a lot every
> day, however, I'm willing to try the proposed out. We should monitor
> feedback from actual users (including us) though as that's by far the
> _most_ important factor in these decisions.


Just to clarify, I'm a user, not a developer of the text-ui (and of most 
of the other components), but I've being using it a lot too, and 
sometimes I found that I don't like some behaviour, or that there are 
things that I prefer in some other clients, that's why I've been 
suggesting those changes... Since I can write code, but definitely not 
an UI developer or an usability expert, for me it is easier to make some 
experiments, find out the behaviour that I'd like to have (sometimes I 
don't really know what's wrong at the beginning), write a patch and say 
"I think that in this way it is better, but let's discuss about it", 
than opening a bug report saying "This behaviour looks wrong to me, in 
my opinion you should do this"

Clarified this, probably in that patch I suggested too many changes at 
the same time, because I thought that those changes were related (You 
cannot understand why I'm proposing to always show the tab bar if you 
don't know that I'm removing the status from the main icon, etc) but 
that was probably a mistake, because perhaps it looked like that I was 
saying "everything you are doing is wrong", and it is definitely not 
what I think.
Anyway I will update the patch (as soon as I have some time) by 
proposing the changes one by one, so that we can discuss them, also on 
the basis of this meeting.


About the meeting itself, in my opinion, it was really interesting to 
hear the opinion of an usability expert and of a non-technical user. We 
should probably do it more often. Also Björn (sorry again if I'm wrong) 
suggested to invite him at our next sprint, and I think that this is a 
very good idea!



Cheers,
  Daniele