unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 03:34, Jarlath Reidy <jarlathreidy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Here's this week's bug bear of mine:
>> http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/6311/as7ob3.png
>>
>> ...
>>
>> 2. happens. And 90% of the time, a killall gnome-panel gets it working
>> again. Surely Gnome panel should attempt to reload it again at least once
>> before producing the delete/don't delete ultimatum? If it really won't load,
>> we should have a slightly better dialog box with a "Report this bug" type
>> feature (how exactly do you report an applet bug?)
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Luke.
>>
> I agree with you 100%. I didn't even know how do properly communicate this
> problem so I never brought it up.
>

That's the most common reason why someone doesn't report a problem, even
though he sees it. Making communication in this area better will make this
type of pain go away quickly ;)


>  Are there any bug reports on this already in upstream gnome?
>

what's the philo of this?
i see the concept of "Manners" entering the computer. A UI has to have
certain manners, which should be taken into consideration while designing
it.
Manners are behaviour, and i've been thinking for quite a while now, if we
shouldn't start considering modeling the UI after behavioural concepts.
Things that point me into this humanoid design direction are general UI
design principles such as:

* fuzzyness / fault tolerance
* make it human-readable
* honor the user's choice
* honor the user's focus
* don't interrupt the user's workflow, unless explicitly requested by him
(e.g. phone calls when not set to "busy" or "away")
* design for affordance
* use heavy constraints in order to reduce clutter and UI entropy
* design a predictable UI

and many many more..

why not layout a humanoid character template with a strict set of manners
and some general rules for reliable predictable behaviour!?

this would be more of a high level design guide in my eyes, than whether or
not to add a dot to a sentence.