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:
- You pick an application which is already in trunk, but not yet reviewed by another person. See this wiki page for reference.
- You open a checklist - today's focus is Configuration Dialogs - and go through the checklist items.
- 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).
- 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!
Comments
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.