[Bf-committers] Design process meeting notes - 2019.08.13

Bastien Montagne montagne29 at wanadoo.fr
Wed Aug 14 10:01:49 CEST 2019




-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [Bf-committers] Design process meeting notes - 2019.08.13
Date: 	Wed, 14 Aug 2019 09:25:20 +0200
From: 	Bastien Montagne <montagne29 at wanadoo.fr>
To: 	Brecht Van Lommel <brechtvanlommel at gmail.com>



Ah OK, thanks for the precision, was wondering a bit what was that 
'design' module… Also think it should not be called that way, UI is one 
half of designing a project, technical/under the hood aspect is the 
other half. If you forget the internal constraints inherited from 
existing code, you can have the best UI/UX design ever, the project will 
likely not success.

On 13/08/2019 22:08, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
> Note we have been calling this the "user interface module", not
> "design module". So to be clear, it's not some new module or team.
>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 9:17 PM Dalai Felinto <dfelinto at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> We had a meeting today about the design decision process in Blender.
>> The design module was represented by William and Brecht.
>>
>> Participants: Brecht Van Lommel, Dalai Felinto, William Reynish
>> August 13th, 2019
>>
>> A lot of the points here apply to the other modules as well. But since
>> the design module spread throughout all Blender is important to also
>> be the more clear in its communication process.
>>
>> Quick topics overview
>> =================
>> * Big picture
>> * developer.blender.org
>> * Buttons removal
>> * Miscellaneous topics
>>
>> Big picture
>> ========
>> The design team helps us define the big picture. And this should
>> always be properly documented so we can refer back to it. Without
>> this, changes may be perceived as arbitrary personal preferences.
>>
>> When it comes to change the user interface to comply to these,
>> however, the specific modules are to be involved directly as much as
>> possible.
>>
>> developer.blender.org
>> =================
>> The tracker is still the place where all the design is presented.
>> Though for the design process often chatting is important. It is a
>> dance where we keep going back and forth between discussing things in
>> our channels, reporting them back to the tracker, receive feedback
>> there, and re-iterate.
>>
>> It is important though to keep the discussions concentrated as much as
>> possible on the tracker, so they are not lost in blender.chat, emails,
>> ... even if only to summarize what was discussed elsewhere. Though the
>> more we can have the conversation there, more open it is.
>>
>> Buttons removal
>> =============
>> We had recently an episode where the first points here were rushed
>> through leading to some disagreement on design decisions. This
>> particular incident was related to the removal of buttons in the video
>> sequence and text editors.
>>
>> This was a very isolated episode where the design behind these
>> decisions wasn't well documented (and reviewed by a broader team).
>>
>> There is not much to add to this though. The autonomy we delegate to
>> the modules may lead to surprises like this every now and then.
>> Considering the sheer volume of the design team workload, I'm actually
>> surprised these "polemics" don't come up more often. That said we will
>> keep working to make sure the bigger picture and guidelines are more
>> clearly communicated and signed of before we go down to the specific
>> changes.
>>
>> Miscellaneous topics
>> ================
>> Since we were together we got over the short/medium term roadmaps for
>> the design module and the current state of a few projects.
>>
>> 1. Video Sequence Editor, or, VSE - need a clear usability picture for
>> the future. [The grease pencil team has a whole task dedicated to
>> bring storyboarding into VSE, they are planning a meeting on that soon
>> - T68321]
>>
>> 2. Collections I/O - during 2.80 we had some rough design for
>> supporting I/O integrated with collections but we need to move this to
>> the tracker [it is on Dalai's list].
>>
>> 3. Short term projects - Drag multiple objects, ... as the first
>> project to follow the new module page format with papercuts and all,
>> the design module has its hands full already.
>>
>> 4. Asset Manager - Bastien (Montagne) is in the institute. He will
>> meet with Brecht about how to tackle it for future releases.
>>
>> 5. Particles / Everything Nodes - The current goal is to have some of
>> it in 2.82. The focus is on delivering something solid as a start
>> point, without getting lost on the project complex scope.
>>
>> 6. UI developer
>>
>> We once again acknowledged that we still need a dedicated UI
>> developer. At the moment our UI developers are also our most senior
>> developers. And we can't afford to fully allocate them for that.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Dalai
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