Recently we’ve noted a series of common conversations that designers have to have with developers (and vice-versa) over and over again. It’d be great if we could document these all and add a variety of sources and links to this.
Here’s a starting point:
http://piratepad.net/opensourcedesign-commonfossconversations
You can add topics here, or on there, alongside your views.
Statement 1: The Command Line is better than the GUI
Ask Question: Better for Doing What/Whom?
E.g. it is great for automatization, many admin tasks, using almost any unix…
Closer to the command/execution model (how much this is actually essential in computing technology, I dont know) btw. assembler is even closer to the computer…
bad for: (almost anything else…) anything visual, hard on the memory (pull the science card!), error prone (dd hhd deletion via accidental parameter swap, anyone?)Statement 2: More options to suit the developer’s tastes
Remark: Having options does not hurt (if the pro settings are reasonable designed and do not clutter e.g. via about: config) but 1) not having good defaults hurts 2) if the most commonly needed settings drown in the other 90%.Statement 3: Everyone has an account (where x is most likely github)
That is hard… »No, many don’t« probably.
Or: Yes, the ones we/you work with now, do, but what about the rest you never work with?We can then also start compiling these as a list of resources for people.
Right, nice!
A bunch of old notes I wanted to compile back then are at Basics of Unobtrusive Interface & Interaction Design · GitHub – regarding settings, and autosave.
Undo over confirmation modal is also a topic which comes up all the time …
Relevant article I link very often is Aza Raskin: Never use a warning when you mean undo and a > typical example discussion: k9mail/k-9#624