[Freedombox-discuss] Natural market for Freedom Box, responsive interfaces

[Nick M. Daly]

Chris Hall writes:

> Your right in noticing that these types of projects rarely mention
> UI/UX in real detail -- it is hard, boring sometimes counterintuitive,
> nitpicking work.

Have you seen the UI ideas?

    http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/UserInterface#Ideas

Full disclosure: I made the "Top Tabs, Vertical Control Panel" section.

> More importantly, I'm not sure people who create the functionality
> even *should* design the UI -- they are way to close to it, understand
> it all in their minds, and thus can't really objectively evaluate key
> UI metrics like 'discoverability', flow, etc.

Yes and no.  The technical design suggests (and often requires) specific
UI decisions to create a holistic and usable experience: when the
design is ill-communicated between the two groups, terrible decisions
are made.  Take the "standard" communication UI: there are 5 different
applications for communicating with the same groups of people (IRC,
Jabber, Google Talk, Phone Calls, VOIP, Text Messaging, and each of the
dozen or so arbitrary network-specific IM clients).  Now, I need to
check at least 5 separate applications to communicate properly.  That's
why the concept of User Identity is fundamental to the system: so each
application can manage its data and let the FBX system manage the
display and interaction.  It's inverting the standard application model,
and it's a lot of work.

Nick
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