New workgroup for better coordination

[Frans Englich]

On Wednesday 07 September 2005 08:24, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 September 2005 11:04, Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> > One of the workgroups will include all projects working on Human/Computer
> > Interactions (HCI), which means accessibility, artwork, translations, and
> > usability. Gunnar and I (from accessibility) have agreed to contact these
> > teams and ask them to find representatives for it.
> >
> > The tasks for the workgroup will be:
> > * Keeping track of all people involved with KDE HCI efforts
> > * Keeping the other HCI contributors in the loop on discussions and
> > decisions relevant to their part in KDE
> > * Ensuring that other parts of KDE are informed about our activities, and
> > letting them know about issues that are important to us
>
> Might I suggest one additional immediate concrete step?
>
> * Under KDE standards,
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/index.html , there are
> links to _three_ HCI guidelines:
>
> 1) http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/(5 years old), some
> stuff about task design and not specifically about KDE code as far as I can
> tell.
>
> 2) KDE UI guidelines,
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/ , which
> does seem to be normative wrt. KDE code.
>
> 3) KCM guidelines,
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/kcontrol_style/ which
> are about wording & layout of KCMs.

...and then there's an unofficial usability-wiki somewhere, the collection of 
documents(commits by Ellen, www/areas/guidelines, IIRC) whose plan is to 
become the new guideline docs, and:

http://usability.kde.org/hig/current/

which is the KDE HIG on d.k.o(point 2 above) in Docbook source, adapted to the 
KDE web framework, and have had an editorial edit(removed smilies, 
exclamation marks, superlatives, spell fixes, that kind of stuff). It's not 
linked to from anywhere, AFAIK.

> None of the three are laid out consistently and none match the layout of
> the rest of developer.kde.org, so the first and most obvious contact that
> developers have with UI guidelines is that they are a complete mess. I have
> this vague suspicion that there is gobs of other HIG work _somewhere else_
> that isn't easy to find. Since anyone can fix up things on d.k.o, a
> concrete task would be to sort out these mixed-up documents (svn co
> https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/developer.kde.org).

No doubt that the current situation is a mess. The reason I converted the HIG 
to docbook and integrated it with the PHP framework was namely to give it a 
consistent look, fix the markup, and so forth.

It was about a year ago that work got completed, and the reason to that some 
rejected it, was that it wasn't worth it because the new 
guidelines(www/areas/guidelines) would replace our current HIG, or something 
like that(my memory may fail me).

It's easy to understand that people have big plans in this area, so I think 
the best solution is to let them sort it out.


Cheers,

		Frans