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  HIG Hunting Season Now Open
Usability Posted by Ellen Reitmayr on Wednesday 09/May/2007, @13:42
from the make-kde-more-usable dept.
In the scope of the KDE 4 Usability Review Cycle that started on May 9, the KDE Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Working Group hereby announces the HIG Hunting Season to be open. Read on for more details.

The HIG Hunting Season is an experiment to include the community into the search for obvious infringements of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines. As those are not fully finished yet, the HCI working group is currently preparing HIG checklists that help to uncover small potatoes that disturb a seamless use experience, such as inconsistencies among applications, incomplete keyboard access, missing feedback, or overloaded configuration dialogs, toolbars or menus. In short: We are asking the community to report user interface and interaction issues that can be stated like bugs.

Applications can be analysed through these checklists by anyone who is testing KDE 4 - users, technical writers, translators, artists, accessibility evangelists, developers, usability people - anyone! Infringements are reported in the bug tracking system and tagged with the attribute "HIG", so it is easy for developers to search and fix them during the usability review cycle.

Today's Checklist: Configuration Dialogs

Today's checklist is about Configuration Dialogs - we plan to announce more lists every three or four days, for example toolbars, menus, context menus, color settings, keyboard access, feedback dialogs, and more.

The procedure for reviewers is pretty simple:

  1. You pick an application which is already in trunk, but not yet reviewed by another person. See this wiki page for reference.
  2. You open a checklist - today's focus is Configuration Dialogs - and go through the checklist items.
  3. For each infringement you find, post a bug. In the title, write "HIG" and the number of the checklist item which is not met (e.g. CL1/1.1).
  4. On the wiki page of the checklist, add a section for the application you reviewed and link all bugs you have created.

For developers, this will probably mean a lot of work. However, many of the HIG bugs can be fixed easily by referring to the checklist, others will be harder. Regarding configuration dialogs, bugs that concern the dialog navigation or size of dialogs can be fixed easily, problems concerning the categorization or grouping require further analysis. Please write an email to kde-usability-devel for HCI support.

Note that this is an experiment, and we hope that many members of the community will contribute to make KDE 4 a consistent and compelling user experience!



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  Related Links
 ·   Articles on Usability
 ·   Also by Ellen Reitmayr
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KDE's wiki is outdated, use TechBase
by AC on Thursday 10/May/2007, @10:34
KDE uses an outdated Wiki version that is difficult to navigate and has a lot of un-needed features. Use KDE TechBase to store the information:

http://TechBase.KDE.org
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Where to download?
by DNx on Thursday 10/May/2007, @10:54
Is there any place I can download KDE 4 binaries for the review? Maybe some LiveCD? I would be glad to check some application, but I don't have time to compile the whole KDE myself - and since this is not even beta I expect problems during compilation...
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Great idea
by ac on Thursday 10/May/2007, @11:03
I think this is a very good idea to get HIG violations ironed out early. However, one crucial point is missing (at least I am missing it...) how do you go about testing KDE4 applications? It would be much easier if there was a LiveCD to download, a WMware image, an open NX server people could connect to, whatever.
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Bugzilla versions
by Bille on Thursday 10/May/2007, @11:27
Applications Authors! Get out and update your application's version number in bugs.kde.org so that HIG Hunters can make sure they are not reporting against older KDE 4 versions.

I've done Kopete already :)
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Nice
by Darkelve on Thursday 10/May/2007, @12:20
Are vertical tabs on the list too?

Don't know if these are infringing, but they DO annoy me to no end!

And the worst of it is that they show up in all of my favorite applications such as Amarok (left pane) or Konqueror (left 'sidebar') and there is no way to have a horizontal layout!
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Checklists
by Bob on Thursday 10/May/2007, @13:36
In my opinion, you need to get rid of those smiley faces in the checklists; they are very confusing. For example:

":-) Does your application have less than 5 menus?
:-( Does your application only look good in resolutions above 800x600?"

Remove the smiley faces and write all the checklist items as positive statements and it will be much easier to read and then scan the application for problems. e.g.

"The application should:
have less than 5 menus
look good in resolutions 800x600 and higher"

By the way, where are the rest of the HIG documents? Most of them on the wiki are blank. I'm starting to get worried that KDE4 will not have great usability because you're deciding on the HIG at too late a stage. :-(
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IRC channel?
by Matt Williams on Thursday 10/May/2007, @13:52
Do we have an IRC channel for this hunting season where HIG people hang out to answer our questions (say, #hig-hunting)? For small problems, IRC is much easier than email for small issues.
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Stuff like this
by hag on Friday 11/May/2007, @05:15
What about confusing stuff like this here (screenshot) in the 3.5.x release?

How can HIGs be formulated to avoid that?

- avoid shortcuts?
- mind the poor translator?
- think?
- talk with users?
- ...

I am not sure formal HIG would help. What is really needed is a formal review process where real world persons meditate on each dialogue and find out what's wrong.

As of the screenshot a simple: A question as 'What does the user want from this module?' would lead to a complete redesign.
Click to download attachment Bildschirmphoto3.png
47KB (49042 bytes)
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Can't this be done automatically?
by LB on Saturday 12/May/2007, @04:07
Why all the manual labour? Extend the EBN to scan for such things. It's more reliable, easier to adjust and can't be interpreted differently. Somehow doing this manually doesn't feel like it's 2007.

http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/
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german button labels too long
by suse on Saturday 12/May/2007, @04:52
i never use any button labels in toolbars. the labels are always too long !
like in Kmail: "Vorherige Ungelesene Nachricht" , "Filter als nicht Spam klassifizieren" and so on. it belongs the whole KDE TOOLBARS, you can find too long labels everywhere. It doesn't even make any difference, if you place the labels beside or below the Symbol in the toolbars. THEY ARE JUST TOO LONG.
Translating rules should follow usability as well.

It would be also nice and very useful, if the custom toolbars in Kicker can optional show a personal label.
Example:
- "show desktop Applet" is placed on the kicker. but the icon is very small.
Adding a label (an applet label, or better custom toolbar that called "Show Desktop" beside the icon
[ Reply To This | View ]
german button labels too long
by suse on Saturday 12/May/2007, @04:55
i never use any button labels in toolbars. the labels are always too long !
like in Kmail: "Vorherige Ungelesene Nachricht" , "Filter als nicht Spam klassifizieren" and so on. it belongs the whole KDE TOOLBARS, you can find too long labels everywhere. It doesn't even make any difference, if you place the labels beside or below the Symbol in the toolbars. THEY ARE JUST TOO LONG.
Translating rules should follow usability as well.

It would be also nice and very useful, if the custom toolbars in Kicker can optional show a personal label.
Example:
- "the show desktop Applet" is placed on the kicker. but the icon is very small.
Adding a label (the applet's label, or better custom toolbar which can optional show a label) called "Show Desktop" beside the icon would be usable !
it is possible in WinXP too, you can try it there !
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Scroll Bars
by scorpking on Thursday 17/May/2007, @23:52
I'va also had some problems getting to the apply button when the screen are set 640x480. This makes it a bit difficult to set the resolution if you don't know how to edit the X config file. I think it would help a lot of users to add more scroll bars to apps.
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