[863] in Athena User Interface
Follow- up to Sun-Gnome-HCI note.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Sep 28 18:42:55 2001
Message-ID: <0vhDngFz00011ZWlkY@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 22:42:52 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
The following is my first attempt to reply to all the issues that Andrea
Mankoski of Sun raised in her recent note to AUI.
Side note: I think its very important that we establish a good
relationship with Sun HCI on GNOME. It has the potential for helping get
some of our stuff codified into the main line of GNOME so that we help
SET the standard instead of always recoding to accomodate the accepted
standard.
So here is my draft, let me know how you think it should change.
-wdc
---
Andi:
Thank you for your note. All too often MIT does work that does not end
up adequately transferred to the wider world. So when you answered my
call to look at our implementation, I was very pleased.
Your note raises many issues. I'd like to comment on them as they
appear in your note.
> On behalf of the Sun GNOME HCI Team, thank you very much for so
> generously sharing your methods and results with GNOME usability testing
and deployment at MIT on the Athena Project.
You are indeed welcome. One of our missions is to get our work out into
the world.
Excerpts from mail: 24-Sep-101 Re: More on MIT usability t.. Andrea
Mankoski@eng.sun. (1412*)
> I hope you will consider providing the source code for some of your
> usability enhancements back to the whole GNOME community.
Giving back to the community is another important aspect of our mission
here. In fact, we have someone part-time who has been asked to:
1. Review GNOME changes we made for Athena.
2. Make sure bug fixes get reported back to GNOME-central.
3. Identify changes and enhancements that are very MIT-centric, and
attempt to provide more general variations on them to GNOME-central."
A fair bit of what we did was not so much code as style-guide convention
and customization. For example, both your and our usability reviews
pointed up issues with icons. I think we both had an issue with submenu
titles too, but I cannot find that in your report.
We adopted a style with bold face submenu titles.
We had the MIT Publishing Service Bureau design new icons for us for
Logout, Emacs, Mail, and the Gnome Terminal window.
I'm not sure the best way to proceed in trying to interest GNOME-central
in our icons.
We don't have the manpower to participate in the actual drafting of a
style guide, but we would like to verify that our hot issues are
identified in it, and maybe propose our solutions into the style guide.
> All of us on the Sun team are curious about how you are faring. What
> kinds of user concerns are you seeing now that your users have had a
couple of months to use the improved GNOME you deployed?
Various of us have informally question users and people who come in
contact with users. The response has been positive overall. Some users
who had given up on the UNIX desktop, attracted by our basic look and
feel are now complaining about other standards of usability we do not
yet support. (We hope one of the larger clases of complaints will be
resolved when Nautilus proves stable enough to adopt by default. We'd
judged it to be not quite ready for prime time on our triple platform
roll-out this year.)
> Are you finding that your usability enhancements were sufficient? Are
> there additional changes you have made or would like to make? Now that
> the school year is under way, are you hearing any comments from students
> who were users of GNOME before they came to use the Athena Project's
> version?
We ended up adopting a subset of all that GNOME had to offer. Our users
got essentially 3 changes:
1. A nicer looking default desktop look.
2. panel
3. sawfish as a new window manger.
GNOME applications that we tried and which seemed robust, like GNOME
calculater, we adopted. Applications that duplicated functionality but
did not add substantial value, we left out. For example, we use XplayCD
on Linux, not the Gnome CD player.
In future we want to enable Nautilus by default. Likewise with session
management, we turned it off because we could not get it stable and
predictable on all 3 platforms. We hope that we can turn it on next
year.
We are evaluating GUI email clients.
The primary follow-on development activities are described in:
http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/plans/aui-follow-ons.html
In addition to development tasks, your question raises the issue of more
formal evaluation of impacts. We are going back to the MIT Usability
Team and investigating possible follow-on impact analysis. Your idea to
ask people familiar with other GNOME systems how Athena's GNOME
integration fares is excellent, and had not occurred to me.
> We also wondered whether MIT offers any HCI courses or other training to
> the Course 6 students (or any others.) You are the first group at MIT
> that we are aware of conducting usability studies.
Interestingly, Course VI seems to have a curriculum that focuses on more
abstract, and less day-to-day things than Human Computer Interaction.
MIT does, however offer some coursework in Human Factors Engineering and HCI.
The following nasty URL is the search I performed with the online
subject listing that turned up one course devoted entirely to Human
Factors Engineering (A joint offering: 16.400/2.18J/16.453J), and two
other subjects in the Media Arts and Sciences course that deal with HCI.
(MAS 630 Affective Compting and MAS 834 Tangible Interfaces).
http://student.mit.edu/@7882995.7043/catalog/search.cgi?search=Computer+Interaction&style=verbatim
I think the next steps are:
MIT Continues to send patches upstream to GNOME Central.
MIT listens to you folks at Sun-GNOME-HCI for clues on how to
particpate in the evolution of a GNOME style guide.
I listen for ideas on how to people interested in our icons.
What do you see as possible next steps?
> Again, on behalf of the Sun GNOME HCI Team, thanks for sharing your work.
Again, you're welcome. Thank YOU for listening to our input and responding.
Bill Cattey
wdc@mit.edu
617-253-0140
