On Wednesday 18 February 2009 02:09:11 pm Aaron J. Seigo wrote: > On Tuesday 17 February 2009, Michael Rudolph wrote: > > So we could just be happy that everybody likes us (well, besides > > ourselves, designers seem to like us :-), but we could also think > > about some kind of outreach program, with which we try to bring both > > cultures closer together. Basically what the user council does for > > users and developers. > > what would such an outreach program look like in your mind?
I would expect something that OpenUsability attempted and failed at: a neutral ground for developers and designers to meet. (Perhaps they didn't fail, KDE just didn't get much out of it) > honestly, we're lacking a couple of critical tools to really start bringing > designers in en masse; plasmate is a step towards addressing that, but > certainly can't/won't be the whole answer. Plasmate won't solve the people problem, it just provides a more useful design tool to work with UI elements than Qt Designer. That's fine when the designer might want to get their hands dirty, but I don't know if it would really support the creative process. Maybe I just don't know enough about the tool. People are the biggest hurdle. Not only where do we get them, but how do we get good people, how do we get good people we want to work with, and how do we keep them. The HCI working group was supposed to do a lot of what you are discussing, however, that was an obvious failure. As soon as it was founded pretty much everyone involved but me and Nuno dropped off the face of the planet. If we can get people, I would say our second challenge is having a place to think and discuss independent of current development. The Plasma team really brought the future to KDE4 because you were able to think so high above the ground and get cool things done (something that GNOME has been struggling to do). However, the entire KDE project needs to be able to do this. To me, Plasma feels like a very exclusive team which is difficult to get in to. There is a small set of people working on an influential part of the environment, but if you aren't developing Plasma widgets then you don't get to join. If other people wanted to rethink high level concepts such as windows and workflows, how do they do that when all of the creative thinkers are locked in a room together? Lately, I've been feeling there is Plasma on one side of the wall, and then there is me with what's left of the usability project on the other, with Nuno and the Oxygen team straddling the wall for random bits of UX. I do my best to help the developers who come to be with help, but it's not too creative and limiting without team members. You've probably noticed my involvement with Kubuntu has increased over the past year in addition to my other KDE work. The simple reason is that it allows me to get involved in shaping the user experience more than KDE does. I always try to push the good stuff upstream afterwards, but that's not the point. I should be doing it upstream to begin with so everyone benefits. So the moral of my rant (I didn't begin my response with this in mind, sorry) I guess is that Plasma has a lot of things going for it in terms of it's philosophy for creative processes. It could be used as a model for founding a more project-wide initiative. However, it doesn't seem like an open environment which can be easily joined, either by fresh designers who are interested in contributing or extended in to the rest of the KDE project. I don't know how that could be solved. ~ Celeste -- Celeste Lyn Paul KDE Usability Project usability.kde.org _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel