The GNOME Human Interface Guidlines [LWN.net]

The GNOME project has announced the release of version 1.0 of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). The HIG is, according to the announcement:

...the most complete and carefully researched document of its kind in the Free Software community [and] a major step toward the creation of an easy to use and powerful set of free applications with a distinctive and coherent style.

Leaving aside the hype, some examination of this 130-page document shows that it is, indeed, an impressive piece of work. The HIG examines many aspects of the usability of graphical applications, from window layouts, color selections, icon design, etc. through to things like how to label menu entries. A simple example of the sort of work that has been done:

User testing of MIT's Athena system revealed that users had difficulty finding the file manager because they were unfamiliar with the name "Nautilus". Because users did not associate the word "Nautilus" with the concept "file manager" the menu item did not help them.

Like many things in the usability arena, this conclusion seems obvious - in retrospect.

Even after years of human factors research, creating highly usable applications still requires a great deal of plain hard work. Application designers are often blind to things they do that confuse their users. Creation of the best desktop applications available requires more than just great hacking; it requires serious attention to all of the little things that make those applications really work for the people who will use them. The HIG, thus, is a great contribution to the free software community, in that it will help to focus and guide that attention.

The HIG is also the sort of work that free software developers are not supposed to be good at. What self-respecting, ego-driven, itch-scratching free software hacker is going to bother with human factors research, after all? Such claims have been increasingly hard to defend for some time; the HIG is just one more example of what the free software community is really capable of.

One other quote from the announcement is worth a look:

Further, we would like to challenge the KDE project to serve the general user community by partnering with us in developing these guidelines to create a common Free Software interface style.... We call on the members of the KDE project to rise above Not Invented Here (a natural tendency that neither project has been particularly succesful in repressing, we know) in taking a major step for the good of both our user bases and the long term success of Free Software on the desktop.

A true gesture toward cooperation could certainly have been done in a less public and challenging way. It is true, though, that the creation of a common interface document could be a good way for the two projects to work together. The creation of a more consistent desktop environment across the two projects would help both - as would a more formal approach to human factors in general. And both projects could join this work while maintaining their own code bases. It's worth some thought.

(Log in to post comments)

The GNOME Human Interface Guidlines

Posted Aug 22, 2002 4:33 UTC (Thu) by pglennon (guest, #649) [Link]

I think it might be more fair to say that the Gnome camp has a bit of a higher plan for their interface guidelines than their own software. The KDE interface guidlines focus on development and integration of KDE software, where as Gnome's Human Interface Guidelines clearly have aspirations ( if not content ) focusing on how to create user interfaces in the free software environment that best serve users.

All that being said, there was undoubtedly a better way to craft the "invitation".

Cheers,
svoloch

The GNOME Human Interface Guidlines

Posted Aug 22, 2002 5:01 UTC (Thu) by drfickle (subscriber, #1093) [Link]

The paragraph was later updated to a less "aggressive" tone. Seth stated that he regrets the wording that went out initially and blames Canada for it.

Huh? KDE has had that for ages

Posted Aug 22, 2002 7:47 UTC (Thu) by morhippo (subscriber, #334) [Link]

Maybe the KDE style guide is not as comprehensive as the corporate sponsored Gnome HIG, but it has been there forever. Has it been taken into account when Sun and Ximian invented their HIG?

It can be found here and it is discussed and updated regularly. It is one of the reasons for KDE's lasting success:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/index.html

Flames from the gnomes about NIH are really not needed. Let's talk about "Harmony".

Huh? KDE has had that for ages

Posted Aug 22, 2002 9:19 UTC (Thu) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

Note that the HIG was not sponsored by any companies, though some Sun dudes worked on it a lot (thanks Calum and Nils!). They're members of our community however, not "Sun drones". Ximian, to my knowledge, contributed very little to the HIG.

This is a community work.

- Jeff Waugh

Harmony

Posted Aug 23, 2002 3:03 UTC (Fri) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

Flames from the gnomes about NIH are really not needed. Let's talk about "Harmony".

OK, let's talk about Harmony. For those of you young 'uns, Harmony was a project to reimplement the Qt graphics toolkit from scratch, using an Open Source license (I think GPL, but it has been awhile). The TrollTech Qt library was, at the time, not Open Source, and this caused major problems for many people around the world, since it meant that KDE, which has always been licensed under the GPL yet linked with the non-free Qt library, was actually illegal to distribute. Accordingly, many who would otherwise have loved to distribute KDE felt they could not do so without mocking the GPL and its principles. (Violating the GPL because "the software is basically free anyway" is not so different from violating the Microsoft EULA because "warez are basically free anyway".)

Harmony was intended to replace Qt so that KDE could be legally distributed. TrollTech refused to relicense Qt with a GPL-compatible license (not that they had any obligation to do so!) and the KDE folks refused to add a clause to the KDE license explicitly allowing it to be linked with non-free libraries, or Qt in particular.

The Harmony project was never completed, mostly because TrollTech eventually re-released Qt under the GPL (dual-licensed with their own license terms) so the whole issue went away, leaving a lot of relieved users and a faint sour taste in the mouth.

But before that happened, the Free Software Foundation helped found a competing desktop environment based entirely on free software, so that KDE, which was not even legal to distribute, would not be the only alternative for people seeking a Pee Cee experience on Unix. It was and is called GNOME, and the rest is more or less history in the making.

So tell me again, how were either Harmony or GNOME were NIH projects? Both were founded to fill the need for a desktop based entirely on free software. To ignore that point is revisionist. You may or may not believe it was OK for the KDE team to release software whose license prohibited its redistribution, but the competing projects were originally about free software, not NIH.