Raphaël wrote: >> creating interaction requires making hard choices, because you >> cannot make an application for everybody. For that you use the >> product vision that you set as a team at the beginning of the >> project. And then you don't fudge when the moment is there. > > I would like to temper this a bit (not agent provocateur as gg, > but maybe devil's advocate): a team that is too rigid about its > vision and never adapts it over time runs a real risk of > becoming irrelevant after a while. On the other hand, having > no vision at all or ignoring it and running like headless > chicken is usually worse. I agree that a product vision, like a national policy, should be reviewed every, say, 5 years. Do realise that when you chance the the vision, that you restart, from zero, a process that takes about 5 years. And thanks for saying that ignoring the vision is worse. >> You make hard choices about which features to include and >> which not. Which workflows to actively support and streamline, >> and which go on the back seat. About beginners vs. Experts. > > But one should always balance the interest of the few who are > targeted by our product vision with the interest of the > majority of the users who are not necessarily part of that > vision. Few? there are millions of users within our vision out there. And if we work to make GIMP represent this vision coherently in the UI, then GIMP will become a viable, natural choice for the people we want to use it. And I thought that we all understand that there is a choice of several free software programs out there for users who want to do simple red-eye removal from their holiday jpegs. We cannot make GIMP for them if we want to make it for the high-end market. One of them has the priority, and the other can use GIMP at their own risk. It took me 5 second to agree with the maintainer of Krita to agree that GIMP and Krita are not competitors, they serve two different markets, and can happily live side by side. > In other words, a decision that provides a small > improvement for the target users but implies a significant > regression for all other users should be considered very > carefully. Actually in this case it the other way around. There is a significant improvement for target users, with clarification of image degradation of everyone, and little or no regression for the lossy-jpeg users. > Our current vision is rather elitist. This is not a bad > thing because this is often the only way to make real > progress. But we should also be aware of its consequences. Well, you have chosen that GIMP is a fast driving machine, able to compete with the best. Do you mind that I try to focus us on that when the question is "what about going shopping?" or "what about taking driving lessons in our machine?" >> Sven did not set the product vision, the GIMP team did by >> consensus. I only moderated that session. But I am here to >> implement that vision on an user interaction level. > > Again, to temper things a bit: this was only a subset of the > developers present at LGM last year (GIMPCon 2006, see the > minutes at http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon/2006/ and read > the section "GIMP Vision"). This is a slippery slope. If anybody can excuse themselves from the vision when they personally do not like the logical outcome of applying it to a hairy UI design question, and bang in their "yeah, but what about me" feature into svn, then we are back at the headless chickens state. Please, do not get cold feet when the law of nature that we cannot make everybody happy becomes apparent. --ps principal user interaction architect man + machine interface works http://mmiworks.net/blog : on interaction architecture _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
