"What's important is not that we can conceive the idea, but that when we actually test it on people you discover it doesn't work... your intuition is wrong." - Daniel M. Russell (IBM Almaden / Xerox PARC)
Usable Us"a*ble, a. Capable of being used.
The GNOME Usability Project
The Usability Project strives to make the GNOME experience as pleasant and efficient as possible. The project aims both to aid developers in their efforts to create intuitive applications, and to lead by creating designs and detailed mockups toward a cohesive and beautiful new generation of the GNOME desktop.
The Usability Project achieves these goals through the creation of an interface guide defining and evolving the GNOME user interface, working with maintainers to find existing interaction problems through user testing, and the visual design and interaction engineering of new desktop components.
If you are interested in becoming involved with the project, please see "How Do I Join?" (below) for information on collaborating with other Usability Project participants by joining our mailing list, or by IRC.
Human Interface Guidelines
One important role of the Usability Project is to maintain the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.
This document tells you how to create applications that look right, behave properly, and fit into the GNOME user interface as a whole. It is written for interface designers, graphic artists and software developers who will be creating software for the GNOME environment. Both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements, and the philosophy and general design principles behind the GNOME interface are covered.
Bugs against the current version of the HIG (2.2) should be filed in bugzilla. Here is the list of current open bugs.
Some ideas for future versions of the HIG are being maintained in the HIG Scratchpad.
Proposals and Suggestions
If you want to view, discuss or contribute usability ideas for the GNOME desktop, please use the /Whiteboard pages.
How Do I Join?
There is currently no formal 'usability team' to join, as such. But you can help out the people who care about GNOME usability in several ways:
Read the article Why GNOME Hackers Should Care About Usability.
Join the Usability Project mailing list. For general usability discussion and project issues, you can subscribe or view the archives of the usability mailing list.
Report usability issues. File issues in bugzilla, marking them with the usability keyword and cc'ing usability-maint@gnome.bugs.
Chat with the team on IRC. You can find us in the #usability channel on irc.gnome.org. There you can find out more about the Usability Project, or just chat about usability and user interface issues.
Useful Links
In addition to the links on the navigation bar at the top, see also:
