Personalized Workspaces and Workflows

Confidence level: **

Status: proposed

Super-patterns

We develop Tools for Humans, and here we consider in general terms how to cater to the needs of different people.

Problem statement

Since different people have different needs and habits, we need a way for them to customize Gnome's generic graphical desktop into something suitable for their particular situation.

People who create or repair physical things frequently have a table where they do their work. Those tables can be very different, however: a woodworker's bench with vises and clamps; a machinist's bench or reference surface; a tailor's layout table and sewing implements.

Although all those tables have something in common - "raised, flat surface where you work" - each one is suited to a particular purpose. Each person's tools are different, their organization is different, and their workflows are different. So, while you could in principle give a generic table to everyone, you would find that people end up customizing that table for the particular kind of work they do.

In the information realm, people may have different ways of organizing files and other information items. Software developers may need particular monitors to indicate system status (CPU and memory monitor, for example) which are not generally useful to end-users (just like a tachometer is useful to race car drivers, but not very useful in a street sedan with an automatic transmission).

Some things are not just a matter of customization, but actually require substantial infrastructure that is outside of the scope of Gnome. In this case, one should allow people to plug in their on software into Gnome and maintain it as a side project, so that they can get their work done.

Therefore:

Allow people to customize their environment up to a particular degree. For further customization that would require extra infrastructure, allow plugging new components at the right places.

Sub-patterns

Usability Project/Pattern Language/Personal Body of Knowledge