[IAEP] future of the Sugar user experience

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi all,

I'm a bit concerned lately about our capacity to keep delivering the
same quality in our user experience. We are seeing a big growth of
enthusiasm in new and old members of our community to contribute to
the development of new features but we haven't tried hard enough to
get new blood in the design team.

What scares me is that we may end up having to chose between stoping
development of new features or letting the engineers design the user
experience. In my opinion both options would be disastrous, the first
because Sugar is still young and has still a lot to grow, and the last
because in my experience a person who has been thinking about how to
implement a feature will have a hard time coming up with a design that
makes sense from the user point of view.

I'm firmly convinced that Sugar's user experience is one of our main
assets and that our future depends in good measure on how well we keep
performing. I'm quite happy of our advances in getting closer to our
users and getting their feedback more directly, but we need more brain
cells to listen to that feedback and propose and debate additions and
improvements.

These are some of the items that have been brought lately and where we
need feedback somewhat urgently so in the next release we can see them
addressed:

- "Edit in develop" action from the view source dialog:
http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/803

- Printing support: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Print_Support

- Querying the contact list (Gadget support):
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Roadmap/0.86#Collaboration

- Tagging of buddies:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Roadmap/0.86#Groups

- Activities are very easily removed: http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/806

- Tagging in the journal: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Library

- Dictionary everywhere:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-May/014217.html

- Browsing file systems with support for folders

- Accelerators rework:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Keyboard_Action

- Search in home view (plus activity tagging?)

- others?

Some ideas about how to increase our resources in this area:

- work together with human-computer interaction
courses/specializations in universities, we should be able to find
some enthusiast teachers that would prefer that their students get a
more real experience,

- recruit more web developers and graphic designers that are
interested in working on non-software stuff, then drag them gradually
to user experience as they get more involved. Try to focus the people
who are good at user experience on it because it requires skills and
experience that are much harder to come by,

- (half jokingly) stop doing such high quality mockups, we developers
aren't going to be able to implement it anyway as beautifully as you
draw it, so better spend time thinking about the design and
communicating the fundamental stuff and let graphical finesse for a
later time (after the feature freeze is a good period for that).

Also, we engineers should get better at engaging in discourse with the
other constituencies of our community. We have a mailing list and an
irc channel for technical discussions, and we are using it in the
right way, but if we go to IAEP and ask non-engineers for their
opinions, we should keep the discussion free of implementation
details. It's not only good for communication, but also will help in
defining correctly the problem we want to solve.

Sorry about the long rant, but I think now is a very good moment to
have some discussion about this issue.

Thanks,

Tomeu