From: "David E Jones" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 8:12 PM
Subject: Re: Some i18n issues
On Feb 3, 2009, at 11:04 AM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
From: "Adrian Crum" <[email protected]>
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
In UI, we begin to hit the Pareto principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
This is a good and a bad news. It means we achieved most and to
achieve the rest it will cost us (actually in our case, I'm much
more confident because we actually hitted Pareto wall earlier :o)
[citation needed]
:D
I just meaned that we are above 80% of UI accomplishment and that
future percentages will cost more and more (for less and less
benefits)... As simple as Jungle Rule...
On one hand I'm pessimistic: I wish it were so and I really think we
have a long way to go with the OFBiz UI, especially since pretty
things and header improvements and such help (and there is still much
room for improvement there), but only have a small effect on
usability. I like to this of usability using the common legal term of
"fitness for a purpose", and that implies that a well defined purpose
is in place and is the basis for design so that users can easily
perform common tasks. That requires a lot of specific design as
opposed to generic design in OFBiz. The goal of OFBiz as I've stated a
few times is to be a good basis and provide tools and generic
functionality that make is easy to create this sort of specific
functionality for a given intended use. We are started to approach
some of this with the specialpurpose apps and with the Requirements
and Designs space on docs.ofbiz.org, but ultimately we can't predict
even the majority of what most organizations want when you get to a
level of detail sufficient to create software that really matches an
organization's needs. When you really design from scratch and
implement to it (using common tools, processes, structures, etc) then
things really vary a LOT between even pretty similar organizations and
the flexibility to support that is what we're all about.
On the other hand I'm optimistic: at least we're not close to the 20%
of work that makes 80% of the difference. Or are we? Maybe what I
described above about apps design to support specific activities that
means we have the 20% generic stuff that makes 80% of the different by
reuse in more specific apps, and not we are getting to the hard part
of the 80% that makes up the last 20% of what users need, and that is
unfortunately usually best done custom because that last part is so
hard to predict and is so different in different types of companies,
and even of different companies of the same type.
A little pontificating is always fun... ;)
I love pontificate :D (anyone lurking this ML knows that already)
Jacques
-David
