[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss Portal] - Re: First pass UI improvements

[julien@jboss.com]

It looks to me that nobody is responsible for usability by and large for the portal project at JBoss/Red Hat but everybody has its opinion.

Roy and Jame Cobb were responsible for usability until James had to work on jboss.org full time and Roy left the boat.

Then Thomas and myself took over the job to redo the management portlet in order to get it done the best as we could.

Now Chris D. and Ram self granted them that responsiblity.

I hope it will be more clearly defined in the future.

ps:

- The template forms were asked for a long time but it was not taken in account.

- the web is designed for documents and that's why we have to hack with javascript or css.

"chris.laprun at jboss.com" wrote : Using javascript is bad for usability (what if the client has javascript deactivated, what if the client is a screen reader, etc.)...
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  | My big beef with these tasks is what is Chris D. authority, more specifically what does he know about usability that we don't? Most of the tasks are more about consistency (which is good) and making things look better (which is good to a point) but for example, switching labels to generic text or using images is less usable to my mind. I don't mind changing things to improve usability, not just to make them shinier from a marketing perspective.
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  | These design issues should be done by a UI person that knows about usability, graphic design, etc. We're going to spend a lot of time changing things that I am not even convinced improve the design. For example, something that would be really useful from the UI team would be a template for CSS-aligned forms (i.e. no tables) that are usable, contain the proper semantic markup with all the alts, labels, what have yous that would make them work properly with screen readers or alternate user agents.

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