UI Guidelines?

This is not a formal proposal, rather an email to gather feedback about 
the idea in general.

Currently, the getUserMedia specification says a little about how a UA 
is expected to obtain user consent (Step 10: Prompt the user in a 
user-agent-specific manner for permission...).

I would like to expand on that by describing in a little more detail:
- What information should be exposed to the user, at a minimum
- What choices are offered to the user (in terms of accept/deny but also 
device selection), at a minimum

In addition, I would like to include some guidelines on how UAs should 
inform the user about whether or not a device (both camera/mic) is 
currently in use, especially if they switch to a different tab than the 
one that has an active getUserMedia session. This is very much in the 
spirit of the SPDY indicator for Chrome: 
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mpbpobfflnpcgagjijhmgnchggcjblin 
and Firefox: 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-indicator/ though 
the actual method of notifying the user will likely be different.

The goal is not to homogenize UI completely. I do support browsers 
trying differentiate themselves with unique user interfaces, the main 
intent of these guidelines is only to ensure that a user is not entirely 
confused when they use the *same* web application in a different browser.

For some types of UAs these guidelines might be meaningless, and that is 
why they are just guidelines. The hope is that atleast the major browser 
will support a more-or-less consistent user consent flow & device usage 
indication.

I'm happy to draft the exact text to be included in the guidelines (and 
perhaps some pictures!), but I first wanted to get some feedback on the 
idea before delving in.

Regards,
-Anant

Received on Monday, 12 March 2012 18:00:12 UTC