[dev] Usability and UI in Horde

[Jan Schneider]

Zitat von Rohan Dsouza <rohandsouza at gmail.com>:

> Let me introduce myself as a Usability and user Interface designer with
> about 6 years.
> As a frequent user of Horde mail i would like to contribute to its UI. In
> terms of Design, Usability and interface features.

Great! Though we try to improve Horde's interfaces all the time and  
probably have a very good state regardig accessibility already, we are  
definitely lacking good and consistent design and usability in some  
places.
Especially Chuck does a great job on improving the interface and  
design, but having someone focusing on this area would be nice  
contribution.

> I view User Experience as a great factor that promotes good software.
>
> Please let me know if any such group exists in horde in which i could
> contribute.

There doesn't exist such a group, only individuals trying to improve  
what we have.
There are several way how you could contribute. From your background  
it's probably easiest if you browse around the applications and point  
out things that need to be improved in your opinion, and discuss your  
ideas on this list. Please make sure to work with the current  
development (CVS HEAD) version, because the interface is consistenly  
worked on.

Something that's really lacking Horde, and that I miss personally very  
often is some kind of style/design guide, similar to Gnome's UI  
guidelines. I don't know if this something you are interested in, but  
it's worth discussing this anyway. If you are very familiar with the  
framework and the applications, you "know" which elements, classes,  
styles and attributes to use for certain design elements. But we're  
still not consistent across all applications. And it would be a great  
benefit if have something written down.
If I design a new screen as a developer, I would like to go to the  
design guide, search for the elements I need to display in the screen  
for the functionality I intend to code, and see immediately which HTML  
elements and attributes and CSS classes I need to use. That would  
speed up development a lot. Something like docs/CODING_STANDARDS,  
though not for PHP code, but for HTML/CSS code.

Jan.

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