I agree that a Usability Team is much needed. A few weeks ago, I was wandering in the "Add a new morph" menu and discovered the Phoneme Recognizer which is very interesting for generating mouth positions for animation programs (Blender and Moho in my case). I have fixed and tweaked some parts of it but yet it need much more work to make it usable. As far I have seen, hundred of morphs are just sitting there waiting to be brought to light (or life) -- time to start the "Adopt a Morph" program.
On the other end, the risk of such team is to walk on the feet of the UI team and yet, there are some interesting things to explore and some opportunities to move beyond the windows paradigm. First things that come in mind are agents, bricks (no other way to explain the cool stuff found on ZOOSqueakDT [1]) and proximal user interfaces [3] (found today in Scala, Blender, Lightwave ... and in some extends Squeak).
So in a sense the job of the Usability Team is not only to clean the Squeak UI or provide a Human Interface Guide but also to inspire.
[1] http://www.languagegame.org:8080/zoo/194 [3] http://www.basden.u-net.com/R/proximal.html
Il giorno mer, 23-02-2005 alle 23:36 +0100, Dominique Dutoit ha scritto:
On the other end, the risk of such team is to walk on the feet of the UI team and yet, there are some interesting things to explore and some opportunities to move beyond the windows paradigm. First things that come in mind are agents, bricks (no other way to explain the cool stuff found on ZOOSqueakDT [1]) and proximal user interfaces [3] (found today in Scala, Blender, Lightwave ... and in some extends Squeak).
A usability team should work in close contact and coordination with the UI, Tools and other teams. Also, it should provide suggestions, not impositions. Also, I don't think usability and innovation aren't at opposite ends: you may create an interface which is both revolutionary and usable.
So in a sense the job of the Usability Team is not only to clean the Squeak UI or provide a Human Interface Guide but also to inspire.
I agree.
Giovanni
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