colomar wrote:I've read through what's there, here are some comments:

• I think the alignment guideline will need to become much more detailed at some point.

Oh yeah. I honestly didn't bother writing much more because I think the existing alignment guidance in the HIG is just fine to get started. I can think of other things we might consider eventually add but not right now.

• The main page has some bullets under "Design Patterns" but those are not there yet. I'd vote for not including that section at all until we have patterns to put in there.

Yup, agreed. It was mostly just a placeholder for the idea of capturing design patterns so folks can solve bigger chunks of their visual design challenge above just the UI controls level. This is one of those areas that we can flesh out over time I think.

I definitely agree on the Style section, and I'd like to see the guidelines currently present in the Presentation section of the HIG integrated into that section.
As for the Overview section: What's written in there seems too global for me to belong into the Presentation section. These principles should not just govern visual design, not even just UI design, but product design in general. Therefore I'd like to see them integrated on the highest hierarchy level. I think we should talk to Heiko about how he thinks they could best be integrated into the Baxley model. I totally agree with their content, btw.

Yay! Good to hear about the content. I certainly agree that, in general, Design Goals and Design Principles could be applied all the way up to the product level. If Heiko is agreeable to putting a reference to them in say the Introduction section then yay (and we can make modifications to wording where necessary). If we can't find an agreeable place higher in the hierarchy for them, I'd offer we put them in the Visual Design Guide section until we do, or we could perhaps host them on the VDG website till then. I'm somewhat reluctant for us to publish Style guidance without the goals and principles to provide context (as a practical matter, I think we need widely available goals and principles along with any style guidance to help service the visual design work already underway). Whatever the solution, I'm sure we'll come up with something that works. Let's go for Heiko's buy-in first though.

As for the Mockup Toolkit: I'd like to integrate that on a higher level as well, given that a mockup is not only for visual design aspects. I could of course be linked to from the visual design guidelines, but it should be linked from higher levels of the hierarchy as well.

Sounds good to me! (with the same caveats as above)

• A Building Blocks section which includes a very simple alphabetical list of UI controls could be added to the new Visual Design Guide section below the Style layer....

Makes sense! That would make it even more important to include visuals in the HIG pages, though, as I assume that people coming from the visual guidelines would expect them even more than those coming from the HIG overview.

Yup, visuals will definitely be helpful on those pages. I don't think they're super-necessary for a first release of the guidelines, but I agree we should get them in as soon as possible.

As soon as we've agreed on how to proceed wrt. the things I mentioned above, you certainly will get the "go ahead!" from me!

Cool, I think we're in general agreement. Let me know if I'm mistaken or if you see any show stoppers based on this response. Also let me know if you'll contact Heiko, or if you'd prefer me to do it.

Thanks much for taking the time to provide feedback Thomas!

alake wrote:Cool, I think we're in general agreement. Let me know if I'm mistaken or if you see any show stoppers based on this response. Also let me know if you'll contact Heiko, or if you'd prefer me to do it.

You're not mistaken, I see no showstoppers either. I think the best way would be for you to send a mail to kde-guidelines with a link to the current status in userbase and ask whether there are any objections against putting that in the Presentation section of the HIG and integrating what's already there into it.
Probably only Heiko will read it there anyway, but that way it's "official".

Thanks much for taking the time to provide feedback Thomas!

Always a pleasure!

Ok, I managed to get the first cut at our visual design guidelines in place here:
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG#Style

For the moment it is under the Style section per Heiko suggestion. We'll have to work over time on getting a more general agreement on the structure. At least for the moment, it has a home. It goes without saying that we can always iterate, iterate, iterate to correct/improve anything and everything as necessary. Yay for wikis!

I'll share the link to the Mockup Toolkit in the public forums so folks there can start taking advantage of it to help them with their mockup work.

Hope this helps!

It's great that they're in now!
However, I think there has been a slight misunderstanding regarding the placement of the specific guidelines. I don't think Heiko wanted to have duplication between the layout and style section (some guidelines being linked from both and having one icon-related guideline in the Layout section and a different one in the Style section).

Currently I think our users might get rather confused about where they should look, but as you said: We can iterate from this point

Oh yeah, I totally agree on your observation. There shouldn't be unnecessary duplication or conflicting guidelines. I'm confident we'll figure it out over time, though.

I may as well share a few thoughts now on some things that I think we'll eventually figure out.

The current Layout, Style, Text structure under Presentation is quite flat and not quite orthogonal. There nothing essentially wrong with that approach, but we can always improve, right? As it is, deciding which visual design guidelines go where start to feel a bit forced when we actually start to try to do it. Many aspects of layout affect style, and vice versa. Text guidelines affect style and layout, and vice versa.

I think eventually it'll be worth it tackle a new structure for what we currently call the Presentation section. The structure of the visual design guidelines, like the design guidelines in a few other projects I mentioned, is a essentially a classic requirements management structure that is increasingly being adopted in areas outside of the classic(mechanical, electrical, systems) engineering disciplines. The justification/rationale for the guidance at any level (the how) can always be determined by looking at which higher level objectives (the what) it is attempting to satisfy. The empirical value of this approach to requirements management is how well it facilitates development, change and maintenance of requirements by different people over time. (My day job is as an aerospace safety engineer so I evaluate this meta-engineering stuff for its effectiveness everyday - I'm happy to share more details on this if anyone's interested).

My own thought has been that we eventually have the visual design guidelines simply replace the Presentation section in it's entirety (and actually call it "Visual Design" instead of the arguably more abstract "Presentation") while being careful to preserve and deconflict any of the existing Presentation guidelines we want to keep/update under the new section structure. But I totally understand if you or Hieko were/are a touch reluctant to do this on the first go.

Anyway, with all of us working together I'm sure we will eventually end up with something we can be proud of!

Honestly, I personally don't really care about the structure, as long as the guidelines are useful and people can find them. I agree that the information that was present in the Presentation section before should be preserved, but I don't think keeping the structure is important. I don't know how Heiko feels about the structure, but that will best be discussed in the mailing list.