[Zope-PTK] PTK and Usability

[Paul Everitt]

Johan Carlsson wrote:

> It might be a good idea to invest in a usability test, and it doesn't
> have to be very expensive. 
> I have shown PTK to a college with some experience in Zope 
> content management (not much at all) and she was very 
> confused. And I also am confused by the way PTK works sometime,
> but on the other hand, I'm a experiences Zope Management User.
> 
> A setup with 5-15 novice users, let them use the PTK and what 
>  there doing without interfering or helping, might give you
> valuable information for changing some UI and scenarios.
> 
> It would also be possible to do a heuristic evaluation with
> help from HCI-professionals.

Just to be clear: our goal with the CMF is *not* to create a perfect 
"product".  Unlike what the CMS market leaders would have you believe, 
there is no such thing as a perfect CMS product.  Instead, we want to 
make it possible to quickly create a perfect product.

The work invested in the demo portal is intended to show off what 
the CMF can be made to do.  It's certainly important to make sure this 
is an aesthetically pleasing and productive, non-confusing experience.  
However, we want others to do more of this skinning, customizing, and 
configuring than we do, to make it fit their needs.  Our time is better 
spent on infrastructure pieces like workflow engines.

Which leads to...

>> Because the "skin" of the portal is entirely customizable (and
>> soon the content objects, too -- please see 
>> http://cmf.zope.org/rqmts/proposals/skinning_content), you
>> are free to experiment with other UI designs.  If you develop
>> a superior alternative, please package it up and make it available
>> to the community on the "dogbowl" site (http://cmf.zope.org).
> 
> 
> I will probably make a generic PTK design (that I've named "Form 1A")
> that I could release to the community.
> I only have to learn how to make skins ;-)
> 
> Another thing that would be useful is a web designer starters kit for PTK.
> That is documentation and templates for common web design tools.

Needless to say, this is crucial to the success of the strategy mentioned 
above.

> I am looking at making a Dreamweaver Template/Library starters kit for
> my own needs. It's hard to do web design on PTK because it so factorized
> to UI-snippets (DW Library might solve that).

Could you go into greater discussion about the snippets problem?

Also, I'm going to send a heads-up about our future, post-1.0 strategy 
on skins in the next email.

--Paul