[Zope3-dev] Re: New Software Space UI

[Stephan Richter]

On Thursday 06 January 2005 03:33, Paul Everitt wrote:
> I agree with Jim's point about asking more basic questions.  First and
> foremost, is this UI aimed at someone who already knows the CA or
> doesn't?  And regarding their sophistication, is this someone more like
> Stephan or, errr, more like me? :^)
>
> If it is someone more like me, and someone that might not have learned
> the CA yet, perhaps we have to take one step farther back.

Well, I think we need a UI for both. We want the Python developer to feel 
comfortable with the UI and recognize the patterns he is used to from Python 
development. This means that there should be a distinction between utilities, 
adapters and views...

On top of that I would imagine a high-level UI that addresses the direct need 
for the site manager. We probably need some sort of basic and advanced view 
for doing this. MS Windows XP's control panel comes to mind. In XP they make 
the configuration for the average Joe much easier, while still allowing the 
power user to switch to classic mode, which we all know from the previous 
version of Windows. Unfortunately, I have not seen such a UI in the Linux 
world yet to give another example.

> At the EuroPython sprint in Sweden, Jim encouraged a couple of us to
> find two people that represented the Site Manager (or Site Developer)
> audience.  We did, and we asked them some questions.  Alas, their needs
> were steered largely in the direction of content management services ("I
> need a simple way to find my workflows, my metadata definitions, etc.")
>
> Still, thinking back on that conversation, I really doubt this actor
> would say: "What I *really* need is a simple way to add a utility."
> IMO, they aren't going to know the relationships between utilities,
> adapters, multi-adapters, interfaces, etc.  They might understand views,
> or at least pages (but likely not the class that is bound to a page as
> the controller).  They might also understand modules, but that sounds a
> bit risky too.
>
> After Sweden, I wrote up some use cases and did a UI mockup and sent it 
> to one of the people we interviewed.  They liked it, but I still felt it 
> was a failure for two reasons:

Could you make those use cases and UI mockups available?

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training