place for design docs

[Celeste Lyn Paul]

On Saturday 12 July 2008 21:45:43 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

> * would you find this useful? (i know i'd enjoy the historical record, it
> would allow us to build up a set of design documents while we work on
> things, and would let us keep track of designs even when we haven't started
> coding them yet which is nice for those who might like to get involved)

Formal documentation of ideas is good because: 
* We have a written specification on what the design concept is
* We know why design decisions were made
* We know who made them so we can ask follow up questions
* We can track the history of the design so we don't repeat past mistakes

For example, I have a collection of wireframes and specifications for both new 
UIs and adjustments to existing UIs.  It would be useful to have a place to 
put them up (besides my blog) for developers to review UI documents or use 
elements in the document as patterns.

There are a lot of other proposals for things like Kickoff 
changes/substitutes.  It would be good to have a single page dedicated to 
these things so we can work on improving the good ideas and not repeating the 
bad ones.

I also agree this is also a good place to document discussions or decisions 
made on mailing lists.  For example, there have been a number of topics which 
have been repeatedly discussed on the KDE-Usability mailing list over the 
years.  Documenting the problem and solution and referencing a mailing list 
thread would provide a better historical document of the design decision than 
saying "We've discussed this already, check the archives".

> * where should we host them? (first instinct was the wiki, but then i
> thought inside the source repository itself  ... the latter can be more
> easily accessed offline. both are easier to find things in than the email
> archives)

I think a wiki makes sense because it makes them easier to edit, access, and 
publicly available.  In this case, the public == future design contributors 
and not users.  Hiding them in SVN would make it difficult for both 
contribution and access.  Developers are familiar and comfortable with that 
type of data access, but most designers I know (outside of FLOSS) don't even 
know what SVN is, yet alone feel comfortable working with it.

Granted, we don't have many non-developer designers in KDE, but I think it 
should still be brought up.  I have an SVN account, but I would probably be 
less likely to add/update an SVN document than a wiki document or link to 
archive file in a wiki.

~ C


-- 
Celeste Lyn Paul
celeste at kde.org
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org
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