Allan – Page 14 – Form and Function

3.10 Reflections

GNOME 3.10 was released last week. A lot of hard work went into it (I know I felt pretty exhausted by the end), but I think that it was worth it. We ended up with an excellent release.

I’ve been using bits and pieces of 3.10 for some time, and completely adopted it (through Fedora 20) about a week ago. It feels like some important aspects of the GNOME 3 experience have started to fall into place with the latest release. Most obviously, we have quite a few new applications, which fill gaps in the core application set. We are also seeing the application design patterns starting to mature. The addition of header bars makes a fantastic difference.

This release also includes some new things which have been planned for a long time, and which round out features that we released in previous versions. Lock screen customisation is one of these, as is the updated application launching view, both of which feel great.

Another exciting thing that happened for 3.10 is that our efforts to modernise the toolkit have started to bear fruit. GTK+ 3.10 has a whole collection of new widgets which will enable developers to make better applications, and should also reduce the amount of work that they have to do. I really hope that this trend continues with even more new widgets and improvements to the developer experience.

GNOME 3 is already in good shape, but as each release comes by, so the vision as a whole takes another step towards realisation. When that finally happens, I think we’ll achieve a qualitative shift in the kind of experience that we’re able to offer. 3.10 is a strong indication that GNOME is making good progress towards that goal, and is a taste of what is to come. Exciting times.

Feature Focus: GNOME 3’s New System Status Area

GNOME 3.10 isn’t far off, and there’s a lot of cool new stuff coming. One of the most visible changes in this release is the new System Status Area. For 3.10 we have reworked this part of the shell, and in this post I’m going to give a bit of background on the process involved in designing and implementing it.

The System Status Area is our term for the section on the right hand side of the GNOME 3 top bar. This is the place where icons indicate how much battery you have left and the strength of your wi-fi network, and so on. It is here that you can also perform basic system-level actions, like powering off. One of the long-standing design goals for this part of the top bar is to consistently use it for system-level status and actions. This makes the area predictable and ensures a clean separation between applications and system.

During the 3.x GNOME series, the System Status Area received quite a lot of work as we sought to refine and mature the original design that was introduced in 3.0. These iterative changes definitely improved this part of GNOME 3. At the same time, the basic design didn’t change a huge amount and was quite similar to what we had in the GNOME 2 days: a series of small icons, each with a menu attached to them. Each icon represented a different aspect of system status (battery, wi-fi-, bluetooth, etc), and the corresponding menu provided actions that you could take in that area.
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Things I’ve been doing

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently. That’s basically because this cycle has been incredibly busy. There’s been a huge demand for design work from our developers, and keeping up has taken a lot of my time. This is all great of course, and I’m really happy to be busy making sure that everyone has all the design guidance that they need.

Since things are kind of crazy right now, and since there is so much new design work, I’m not going to cover the new designs in a huge amount of detail. Instead, I offer you a list of the things I have been working on recently, along with links to additional resources.

Things I’ve been doing:

Documenting the GNOME Shell notifications design
Developing the combined system status menu that Jasper is working on (now up to version four!)
Specifications for a new GTK+ progress spinner
New Software designs, including updated hi-resolution mockups and a set of wireframes
Updated Add User designs for Settings
Updated Search Settings designs
A new design for a time zone selection widget (to be used in the new Time & Date settings, Initial Setup and Clocks)
A fresh Tweak Tool design
Wireframes for search in Files
New Calculator mockups
Wireframes for Music, in particular Playlists and Search
Wireframes for geolocation support in Clocks
New designs for Displays Settings
Experiments for a new GTK+ tab widget
Layout guidance for the GNOME Shell login screen
A new iteration of the new avatar selection widget (to be used in Settings, Initial Setup and Contacts)

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Every Detail Matters is Open for Business

details

Everyone’s favourite UX polish extravaganza is back for another round. For the next months we will be targeting a host of bugs that will add polish and finesse to the GNOME 3 user experience.

This is the third time that I’ve run Every Detail Matters. Over the last two rounds, the initiative has gone from strength to strength. A total of 82 bugs have been fixed so far, and the GNOME 3 user experience has been massively improved as a result of everyone’s contributions.

With all of this progress, it might seem that there’s nothing left to work on. However, there are still plenty of bugs out there, and there are many possible enhancements that can be made. I’ve lined up a substantial bug list for this round, with some pretty cool stuff in it. If you are interested, check it out.

If you have never contributed to GNOME before and fancy having a go, Every Detail Matters is a great place to start. Likewise, if you’re an experienced developer or GNOME contributor and fancy adding a bit of user experience polish to GNOME, this is a great way for you to take on an extra well-defined task or two.

Telling GNOME’s Story

The 2013 GNOME Marketing hackfest finished yesterday. We did many things over the course of the three day event: we updated the design of the website, discussed new outreach initiatives and planned how to clean up the marketing wiki pages. But our main focus was the development of a clear story for the GNOME Project. We spent a long time talking about why GNOME is important and how we think that contributors think and feel about what they do.

We refined and defined these ideas, pulled them together to form an integrated identity, and started the work of translating them into text and pictures with which they can be communicated.

While GNOME has not had a clearly articulated story in the past, I believe that we do have compelling aspirations. If you look around our project, you will see a lot of highly motivated and passionate people. They find GNOME inspiring, not just because of the technologies that the project produces, but also because of its wider mission and ways of working.

Our job in marketing is to distill these ideas about GNOME into something that can be easily communicated to the outside world, and to ensure that our messaging is consistent enough to make us familiar and recognisable. Over the coming weeks we will be continuing this work and will be presenting it to the rest of the project for feedback, comment and further development.
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