schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gentlemen,

We are about to embark on an exciting journey into the unknown.  Well,
semi-unknown, as I'll try to minimize the chaos and initial anxiety,
but essentially, we're doing something new and long overdue, a big UI
cleanup.

A big part of this is changing how we work together for a concentrated
period of time.  I want us to be chatting by default, asking
questions, etc. as much as possible.  I want everyone looking at
everyone else's work.  When you finish something, send a screenshot.
I need the Western Hemisphere guys awake in the morning while
Lithuania are still online, and Justas doing daily merges from Douglas
and Alan to have fresh builds ready for morning in America.

Primary goals -- to START the following:

* From a programming and user action perspective, the biggest change
is a moving links around, completely re-doing all the "action links."
If they will always appear on the page, in most cases they should
simply be moved to the body of the page.  Some actions may become
tabs.  Most externally added actions will be dumped into a sidebar.
We will also have more control over the ordering of links in various
viewlets for a more consistent user experience.

* From a design perspective, we'll be making a major change primarily
based on the Ubuntu Web Guidelines.  Aside from the use of orange
(we'll probably use red), we will follow these by default.  Of course,
we won't follow them slavishly, since a web application is different
than a website, but these guidelines will always be the starting
point.  Please familiarize yourself.  Make sure and look at the
buttons.

* As part of the above, we'll probably need a big CSS rationalization.
 In particular because we'll want to make it easier to adjust colors
entirely across the application in both the near and far future.  This
includes things like making the gradebook and journal use the same
palette.

* Also, next Wednesday I'll have my first meeting with the local
design firm to plan out work which hopefully will encompass a new page
design for SchoolTool.org, a color palette for SchoolTool (which is
why good CSS is important), probably a grid design for gradebook and
journal (that is, the line weight, color, etc.,), and maybe some
advice about the graphic design of the new SchoolTool ui.

* We're going to add jquery-ui widgets where appropriate to improve
the user experience.

* I want SchoolTool to use the Ubuntu font whenever possible, so we
need to do what ever needs to be done for that.

* We'll update pages with inadequate explanatory text and eliminate jargon.

Realistically, that's more than two weeks work, but if in two weeks we
can establish the processes, expectations, standards, etc. to finish
the work in a less intensive way, then we'll be successful.  As of
yesterday we had 10 weeks until feature freeze, so we're in pretty
good shape.

My weekend homework at this point is to get the spreadsheet of doom
going, which will basically have a row for every view, and columns
based on the above so we know we've considered each issue on each
page.

--Tom