[drupal-docs] Usability guidelines

[Neil Drumm]

I think we need to work on human interface guidelines. Think along the
lines of
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html
http://usability.kde.org/hig/current/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/

Apple's guide is probably one of the most important works in this field.
I have seen other human interface guidelines, such as Java Swing,
explicitly say that they don't cover some topics and Apple's book is
where to look.

These guides are a great resource for the fundamentals, but we need
something written for websites and specifically Drupal. I haven't seen
any human interface guidelines for other web application frameworks,
maybe Drupal would be the first.

As a start I have taken a couple stabs at writing some things. My latest
work in progress is
http://foo.delocalizedham.com/tmp/page.html

Which I see as the Drupal version of
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGWindows/chapter_8_section_3.html

This page is not nearly finished. I started with the diagrams and plan
to describe them and more as I have time. Then specific elements of the
pages, such as local tasks, should have more in depth sub-pages.

Previously I have tried making 
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/contributions/sandbox/drumm/ui_guidelines/drupal_ui_guidelines.html

Which should be integrated into the future pages, but I'm not sure that
bottom-up approach is right.

-Neil

http://civicspacelabs.org/
http://delocalizedham.com/