ubuntu-developer-manual team mailing list archive

[Kevin Godby <godbyk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, everyone.

My email may be a bit off-topic, but I hope that it will improve
future design critiques and discussions.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Kyle Nitzsche
<kyle.nitzsche@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Right, design is mutable and subjective.

This is only partially true.

A design (whether a book design or a user interface design—the only
two types of design I feel remotely qualified to discuss) is trying to
solve a problem.

Criticism of a design can fall into a couple of categories:

1. a disagreement about what the goals of the design should be; or
2. how well the design achieves those goals.

To constructively criticize a design, the critic should first
understand the goals of the design—the problem the design was intended
to solve.  If the critic's and designer's goals differ, then that must
be resolved before criticism of the design itself is useful.

Let's look at an example.  A problem statement might be: We can't tell
when one paragraph ends and another begins.

There are a number of potential solutions to this problem.  An early
solution was to run the text of the paragraphs together and indicate
the start of a new paragraph with ¶.  Another solution is to indent
the first line of a paragraph.  Yet another solution is to separate
paragraphs with some blank vertical space.

The current book design employs the second solution.

Keeping in mind the original goal—that we want to make it clear when a
new paragraph starts—one can see that it's unnecessary to indent the
first paragraph following a section heading, as it's obvious that a
it's a new paragraph.

One criticism I've had in the past is that the first paragraph
following a section heading should be indented.  In this case,
however, the designer and the critic have two different goals in mind:
the designer is only trying to make it clear where a new paragraph
starts while the critic is implicitly adding a new goal of consistency
(that *all* paragraphs should have their first lines indented).  This
criticism falls into the first category—a mismatch of design goals.
[Note that I don't know if Kyle was making this particular argument,
but I don't want to put words in his mouth. This is a criticism I've
heard from others in the past, however.]

For a criticism to be useful, the underlying goals and assumptions
made by the designer and the critic should be made explicit so that
they can see whether it's a mismatch of design goals or a disagreement
over the implementation (how well those goals were met).

Having said all that, if anyone has any questions about a particular
design element—why it is the way it is—please feel free to ask me.
Many of the elements were designed with purpose and with particular
goals in mind.  Some elements have not been designed yet (by me, at
least) and are simply the defaults showing through.  It's much easier
for me to respond to critiques when I know what goals you have in
mind—what problem you're trying to solve—and vice versa.

Thanks for reading!

--Kevin