Things You Can Do With Other People

It's always tempting, but don't start coding your interface straight away. Sketch out some ideas on paper first, or in Glade or HTML if you prefer. (But don't be tempted add any functionality at this point if you do it this way!)

Show these prototypes to other people— the GNOME mailing lists and IRC are ideal for finding likely candidates. Ask them to use these prototype interfaces to run through some of the scenarios you came up with earlier. You'll probably get questions like "how would I do X", "which menu is Y on"... these questions will help you think about the interface from the user's viewpoint. You'll probably also get a few suggestions about how to do things differently— these ideas may or may not turn out to better than yours, but any idea from a potential user is worth considering!

You should also consider seeking opinions from the GNOME Usability team. They have designed many user interfaces before and may be able to spot potential problems at this early stage, before you take your design too far to change easily.

Once you've decided on the basic interface design and have started coding parts of it, find somebody to try it out again— it doesn't have to be the same person. You'll probably find some more problems that were hard to see on your static paper prototype. By finding these now, it's usually not too late to fix them without too much trouble.

If you intend your application to be translated into different languages, show draft designs of your application to the GNOME Translation Team. They'll help you find potential translation problems, such as not leaving enough space for translated labels, shortcut keys that cause problems on a different keyboard layout, or using new terms in your app that are hard to translate.

If possible, try out your application with users from the locales you are targeting. This will help you determine whether users understand how to use the application, if they perceive the graphics and colors the way you intended, and if there are words or images in the application that may cause offence to users of that locale.