Re: Action-531: Try to tease apart aspects of the document which are UI Guidelines

Thanks Maritza. I think this is a substantial enough proposal that we need 
to discuss it in a meeting. And we'll need to have an editor there as 
well, as we need to get the proposal to a state that it can be edited in. 
That would make it either a sequence of smaller items, or you'd need to do 
an example of all the changes for folks to look it over and get the idea. 

Shall we put this on the agenda of next week's meeting? If both you and 
Anil can make it, then I'm game (since Thomas has already sent regrets). 

          Mez





From:
Maritza Johnson <maritzaj@cs.columbia.edu>
To:
W3 Work Group <public-wsc-wg@w3.org>
Date:
11/04/2008 01:13 PM
Subject:
Action-531: Try to tease apart aspects of the document which are UI 
Guidelines
Sent by:
public-wsc-wg-request@w3.org




This action item addresses the comment "It was not written by user 
interface people and not for user interface people ... and by the time 
we get to the brief user interface guidance in sections 6,7 the way is 
lost." On the Oct 15th call we discussed some ways to fix the 
document: renaming the document, adding more text to the intro, giving 
UI readers more direction ...

Stepping back and reading from his perspective I can see where he's 
coming from. The content is good but the presentation is confusing. I 
think we can improve readability by reordering the sections, renaming 
some of them, and explicitly indicating which sections are most 
relevant to UI people.


The sections should be reordered to present the more general UI advice 
first. Section 5 addresses the application of a specific technology 
and it's presented as the first section of content. We have a lot to 
say about TLS, but I think it should be more toward the end of the 
document because it's so specific. We should also consider adding an 
intro paragraph to 5 about why it's the most worked example.

Section 7 is has the most general UI advice and should be the first 
section of content after the overview and scoping/definitions. We 
should follow it up with is separate section for communicating error 
messages (error handling and signalling). That's one of our stronger 
sections and we should highlight its importance for the design of 
future interactions/interfaces. The remainder of the current section 6 
should follow.

Section 8's name is too general. I think we're presenting this 
information as security lessons learned from  the mistakes/oversights 
of others. We don't have concrete advice on how/when each of them will 
come up but we want people to be aware of these issues when they're 
designing security indicators. I don't have a great suggestion for a 
new name but the entire document is asking them to consider security, 
so this name doesn't feel precise enough. Maybe - "Additional Security 
Threats to Consider".

We should combine sections 3 and 4, both sections contain definitions 
that relate to the document as a whole and tell the reader what the 
document is focused on.

The section could look something like:
Working Definitions and Assumptions
                 - Document Scope
                                 - Product Classes (3.1)
                                 - Interaction Model (most of 4.1)
                                 - Content (rest of 4.1)
                 - Terms and Definitions (4.2)
                                 - Common UI Elements
                 - Language Conventions
                 - Levels of Conformance
                 - Claiming Conformance


The first sentence of the overview doesn't capture the intent of the 
document.  "This specification deals with the trust decisions that 
users must make online" -- aren't we dealing with the communication of 
security context information and suggesting ways for UI designers to 
support them in making informed security decisions? (I probably missed 
some long discussion about why we're using trust here instead of 
security.)

Should we move the acknowledgements section to precede the reference 
section?


-- Maritza

                 http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~maritzaj/