[Zope3-dev] Re: New Software Space UI

[Jim Fulton]

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? :^)

Good point.

> 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.

Yes, especially wrt utilities.

> 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.")

This is the sort of thing that "tools" are meant to help with.

They also wanted ways to very easily create content types, which quickly
turns into a development effort. Sigh.

> 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.

I agree wrt everything but utiltities and possibly wrt the name "utility".
They know that they need to add things to their site that do stuff. An
open question is what the most natural way to talk about this is.

BTW, (thinking out loud) It's possible that an answer may turn out to be
"assemblies", which are collections of preconfigured components.  At a course
scale, a Plone site is an example of this.  Still, they need to work at a
sub-assembly scale when they want to customize things.)


> 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:
> 
> 1) It was functional, but for content management.  It isn't clear to me 
> that this is a good line of reasoning for Zope 3, which is bigger than 
> CMS.  Alas, we'll have a hard time finding non-CMS "Site Managers" to 
> help us, and even if we do, we might have a hard time find similar 
> patterns.
> 
> 2) I personally don't understand the total zen of interfaces, adapaters, 
> utilities, views, and friends.  The big picture is overwhelming.  I'd 
> still like to help on various little pictures, if someone else manages 
> the big picture.

Well, the picture has been becomming simpler over time.  I agree that there
should be some users that need to see the model at a higher level.

I'd be interested to see your use cases.  They might provide some ideas.

Jim

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