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Which is why I am a usability engineer, and tried applying for the Ubuntu Add/Remove usability testing internship : )

Don't give up. Please, we really do need more good UI critics. (Good ones mind you, not just random users who think that because they use a piece of software they know how to design a UI for it.)

I hope you keep offering your criticism. If you want a more receptive audience you might consider getting involved with http://www.openusability.org/ which is a recent attempt at matching people with UI skills to projects that are looking for UI criticism.

Not all projects are receptive to UI criticism, but quite a few are. Sometimes this also changes depending on the project's priorities, for instance, if they're currently working on a massive change to pieces of the core, usability issues aren't high priority, as sad as that is. Often it's a timing issue not just an issue of willingness.

The other thing you might want to consider doing is not mentioning the way other products do things as a reason to switch. I think most open-source developers are very averse to someone who says "I'm more familiar with this way because product X does it this way and I think it's better." You may be right, but do you know how often they hear the same thing from people who are dead wrong and just lack familiarity with the project? All the time.

So if you can, in the future, you may want to try and frame your request as "I'd like it behave like this because it's better than how it currently behaves because of reasons A, B, C." If someone notices that you've asked for the behavior in a different product, well, that's fine, but you've given the reasons for the new behavior. It isn't completely unfair to ask people to justify UI changes using concrete reasons instead of "I know what I'm doing and this is better" or "This other product uses it and it's better." Please understand that until you've actually built up credibility as someone who knows what they're talking about on a project, people will go ahead and argue with you. (And sometimes they will even if you have) This arguing is often a good thing and is how a lot of good development in the open-source community works. Often the resulting design ends up being something neither side envisioned and the improvement is quite good. People argue about things until someone convinces them.

Anyways, I hope you keep at it.

There is lot of scope to improve or sell FOSS on Usability front. http://www.openusability.org/

Okay one more time back to you.

Of course the inner circle of developers care about users. We code, for free, to develop software with the ultimate aim for it to be used! To say that we don't care about users is just plain daft.

> If they did care about users they would have set up usability studies by now under their own initiative, but they haven't.

Except we did. http://www.openusability.org/ and KDE has its own internal usability group with approx 10 people, 1 or 2 of which are professionally trained. They are swamped with requests, and as I've said - there is _far_ more demand than supply.

To give an example, the start menu replacement in KDE4 was done with a large amount of usability testing, funded by Novell/Suse. You can download the videos of the user testing if you want to.

> And as they are more focused towards the needs of contributors/developers, even if someone were to devise and carry out KDE usability studies, it's debatable if they would want to overhaul KDE according to these findings.

KDE is continually overhauled to try to fix problems. I personally work on the task manager and have drastically overhauled it from KDE3 to KDE4 based on (rather short) talks with a usability expert. The start menu was completely replaced, the run menu was completely replaced, and so on.

As I've said - seriously, just email pretty much any project group in KDE saying that you wish to do a serious usability analysis, and they will be very happy indeed.

> Contributors and developers like to tweak their UI settings and like things complicated and KDE serves them well in this regard. On the other hand users just want it to work;

'Users' are a very wide range of people. To suggest that all users want no customization is just plain silly. I personally believe that there is no problem with having as much customization, as long as that customization does not get in the way or confuse ordinary users. There's no point removing an option if an ordinary user would never come across it, for example.
It is always good to provide sensible defaults that make it work well for ordinary users.

It is still being worked on. Check also this page: http://season.openusability.org/index.php/projects/2008/kde4

Is there a finished KDE4 HIG available somewhere? An (admittedly quick) Google search only get to this, which looks more like an early draft.

OpenUsability

I used to work at the company which started it. It's a platform for free software developers to meet usability specialists, and so far it's coming quite good. The KDE 4 HIG was designed by us ("us" as i still used to work there at the time this was done), and the people working there are certainly bright minded people, but there's always friction at the implementation front. In my experience it's not neccessarily easy to convince a developer that a given usability decision is the right one, even if someone with a background in usability makes the proposal.

Gnome is better.

The other issue is that Gnome has really solid User Interface Guidelines. KDE's basic HIG is just "see how many buttons you can add to that menu".

So, those who are still using KDE are possibly:
A) Northern European (this is true for some reason)

B) Have been using linux since the 90's and don't feel like changing ANYTHING

C) Using Linspire or Xandros or PC-BSD or some other "easy" distro

D) Like the letter "K"

Since the original poster seems to prefer permissive licensing, he should also check out the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.0. It's an extensive set of best-practices and guidelines, licensed under the GFDL. Thus he can tailor the guidelines to his needs and redistribute them without worrying about copyright issues (another poster suggested setting-up a wiki for his users, which could also work).

The KDE Usability Guide also has some good material, although at this time it looks much less mature than the GNOME docs.

Isn't that what Open Usability is about? Additionally, considering the number of exceedingly terrible websites I've seen by so-called "Usability Experts," how can you really define what it means to be "qualified?"

You mean, "they were added because a significant number of users who were motivated and willing to submit feature requests using the appropriate mechanism, who were technically competent enough to do so and knew that such a mechanism existed requested a particular feature". Which, of course is a flaming great classic example of response bias - the same thing that makes television and newspaper polls useless as an indicator for the actual value of a population parameter.

Yes, there is bias there, but not as bad as you would make it seem. Technical users make requests on behalf of less technical ones as well. And face it, the majority of Linux users are technical users. You can ignore this and not cater to them if you want, but you're targeting users that may never even use Linux. Usability tests have shown that user have just as easy a time doing tasks with KDE than Windows XP. The current desktop is not an impediment to user adoption. Less technical users don't use Linux because of hardware support, pre-installs of Windows, and lack of awareness. Sit down a normal user with Linux (KDE or Gnome) and they won't have more trouble with it than with Windows.

What you have is an bunch geeks and hobbyists - the very people to want extreme, nifty and mostly useless features - in control of functional requirements for KDE.

Face it, that is the majority of your user base. You can't neglect your primary user because of some mythical novice user. They are also extremely valuable, because technical users _contribute_ while novice users just use the software.

Also, what about removing useless features? Does that ever get voted on?

Yes, and features get removed from KDE regularly if they create real problems or can be replaced with a better system. Removing features just because someone is confused by them is not a valid reason. You have to think about it more critically than that.

despite the fact that major usability studies were run on GNOME in 2001 and 2005 and continue in part at betterdesktop.org

So? KDE has similar studies, on that site, as well as http://openusability.org/ and from the KDE usability team http://usability.kde.org/activity/testing/relevantive-kde3.2/index.php and independently http://www.linux-usability.de/download/linux_usability_report_en.pdf

Please, Gnome are not the only ones thinking about usability. They are just suffering from the delusion that less features and less configurability makes for usability, when in fact the problem is much more complex than that. Making simple software usable is comparatively easy to do. The real challenge is making complex and flexible software usable without removing any of the power. KDE hasn't solved that problem, obviously, but they are working towards it without throwing out what makes KDE worth using over something like Windows.

http://www.openusability.org/ ??

By the way I just found this on the web.. a little outdated, but fairly interesting and promising:

OpenUsability Sponsored Student Project: GIMP

OpenUsability is proud to announce the offering of a series of sponsored student projects. As the first project, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has been chosen. We are looking for a student in usability or interaction architecture who wants to work on designing the user interface for the next generation of GIMP.

If you are a student of usability, user-interface or interaction design and want to enrich your education with a hands-on experience don't hesistate to apply:

http://www.openusability.org/studentprojects
http://openusability.org/projects/gimp/
http://www.gimp.org/announcements/open-usability-g imp.html

By the way I just found this on the web.. a little outdated, but fairly interesting and promising:

OpenUsability Sponsored Student Project: GIMP

OpenUsability is proud to announce the offering of a series of sponsored student projects. As the first project, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has been chosen. We are looking for a student in usability or interaction architecture who wants to work on designing the user interface for the next generation of GIMP.

If you are a student of usability, user-interface or interaction design and want to enrich your education with a hands-on experience don't hesistate to apply:

http://www.openusability.org/studentprojects
http://openusability.org/projects/gimp/
http://www.gimp.org/announcements/open-usability-g imp.html

If you have to teach people something, you have already failed. Users Don't Read the Manual. So if your interface expects them to do so, your interface is probably flawed.

They are not trying to guess what the users might do, they are doing some serious research on it. As a result, they have come up with some great improvements such as kickoff. And their new HIG

It is not about the computer deciding what is best, quite the opposite, on usability you are supposed to empower the user. The link is from what will become their next HIG. It is pretty safe to say that KDE has allways done well in this particular area.

If you have to teach people something, you have already failed. Users Don't Read the Manual. So if your interface expects them to do so, your interface is probably flawed.

They are not trying to guess what the users might do, they are doing some serious research on it. As a result, they have come up with some great improvements such as kickoff. And their new HIG

It is not about the computer deciding what is best, quite the opposite, on usability you are supposed to empower the user. The link is from what will become their next HIG. It is pretty safe to say that KDE has allways done well in this particular area.

Linux/Unix users are a self-selected bunch. You need to decide whether your user persona should be Joe Clueless (who is put in a room and has to perform basic functions in Linux) or the Power User.

The Power User may turn out to be the more typical linux user (from the standpoint of HP/IBM), so the reactions of Joe Clueless may just not be useful. Good to have a specific goal in mind while running this study. Are you trying to help developers understand power users better?
Or trying to help a company make mass market tools?

If dealing with Joe Clueless, be sure to give tasks about how to locate system documentation. I just installed Fedora Core and for the life of me couldn't find it (and I'm a fricking tech writer!)

Also, should you assume that users are dealing with a fully installed system (office/school user)? Or that users normally would need to figure out how to get their hardware to work (home user)? My "usability problems" have usually not been with the interface but just getting hardware to work, and that would not so much a problem if the Office/School made these decisions for me.

I would be very curious btw which of the package managers that users find the easiest to use. Crossdistribution comparison of how individual users used package managers would be really useful information!

This group does a lot of usability analysis http://openusability.org/index.php .
Also, I seem to remember that a few years ago Sun did a usability study of the Linux desktops.

This is not about preaching. This is not about pushing ideology. This is about developers maintaining creative control over the kernel, the kernel that they themselves have been building. Exactly what is your problem with this?

You say here that 'not only do users not care about "Free", but they will actively dislike "Free".' While regrettable, that is fine -- that is the users' prerogative. I sincerely expect they will think more highly of "Free" the tighter the IP and DRM restrictions become, but these related issues have been discussed to better effect in many other threads.

The trouble with your argument here is that the folks building and maintaining the Linux kernel (and most of the rest of userland Linux software too) are precisely the people who are concerned with this "Free" that you apparently couldn't give a rat's ass about. This has nothing to do with wanting 'to push their ideoligy [sic] on others', and everything to do with wanting to stay in control. As A nonymous Coward noted, building an unchanging driver API for the convenience of corporates does nothing for the kernel:

A "stable" binary API removes the possibility of keeping everything up to date and would dramatically show down the adoption of new features and general improvements.

Again, this has nothing to do with pushing ideology. This has to do with developers maintaining control over their own project, a project that has been provided to you as a courtesy out of the strong moral belief of many in the OSS community that the tools we use to get our work done should be freely available.

Furthermore, given the significant number of websites devoted to OSS usability concerns (over 17,000 at last count), I think we can safely regard as invalidated your claim that '"Free" software people ... don't care about makeing [sic] functional easy to use systems.' They would indeed seem to care, but specifically within the scope of making free software -- i.e., they are not interested in kowtowing to your whinging demands that they gut their principles solely to make something passably usable right this very moment, and shackle themselves with a rigid driver API that hampers kernel development far into the future and threatens to scuttle years of effort to make a fully-usable computer system that is not beholden to secret vested interests.

You, sir, appear to be crying out that consumer convenience is more important than freedom. This is much in tune with the prevailing cultural trends in the United States. I find this deeply ironic -- "Give me liberty or give me death" has been turned into "give me convenience or I shall whinge", while "the land of the free and the home of the brave" has become "the land of the sheep and the home of the enslaved". While I understand the frustration apparent in your posting regarding when things do not work, I cannot agree with your sentiment. Some things, sir, are more important than instant gratification. I am deeply sorry that you do not appear able to recognize this.

.. "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes", so I would have taken out the bad parts of my post.

What I wanted to tell is that with knowledge and the will to contribute you can help with open source software. Even if you are not a software writer, even if you are not 'artsy' (KDE is attracting lots of these lately), and even if you are not a good documentation writer. As long as you know what 'usable' is, open source projects could use your thoughts.

With open source you can communicate directly with the developers, something that is rarely possible with the commercial software. Just contact a particular developer and ask if you can be his 'ordinary user'. Warn him/her that you _will_ be irritating.

Some of your ideas are maybe a bit too broad for this kind of direct interaction (you would need to communicate with lots of developers at the same time). But if you just pick one to start with, say the "easy transition" item, you could start flicking little improvement ideas into the heads of the developers.

For example, a mail to some Konqueror dev: "How difficult would it be to import Favorites from Internet Explorer if I would give the directory to read from?"
"Could you check for changes in the IE Favorites every time Konqueror starts?"
"Take a look at the Wine code to make an educated guess for where the Favorites are placed"

At the moment few applications can import data you could suggest someone to wrap it up in a migration wizard.

But I guess you get the picture. Go kick those shins ;)

PS: I think the slight trolling tone as in your original post might even help a little, if used moderately. It pushes the person on the other end to think about the situation.

PS2: There's a new website for these kind of things at http://openusability.org/ . But I think it's more targeted at the professional usability experts. As a newby you might get bashed away (don't know if there are big ego's there, still haven't encountered them ;).

PS3. You could also try to achieve some things by filing bugreports, but I think that won't be as effective as directly talking to the devs (bugzilla's are not for chatter).

Each member has an "OpenUsability Peer Rating" (borrowed from Advogato) and a Skills Profile. Not every member takes advantage of this but it seems like a good framework.

Open source software is nice and all but it is severely lacking in usability and UI design. Developer do not usually make good UI designers.

That's what projects like Open Usability are trying to address.

Not to mention that there is plenty of corporate money going into projects like Gnome (take Sun's JDS, for example), and some of that money could easily go into interface design by professionals in the field (assuming, as you do, that developers are utterly incapable of learning to design usable interfaces themselves, which is debatable).

Not to mention that there's plenty of closed-source products out there that have shitty, non-standard interfaces.

Are you sure that the one thing plaguing the Linux desktop (which some report is too fragmented and has too much diversity to ever make it into the mainstream), is that it doesn't have a myriad of closed-source alternatives (each probably using their own non-standard interface) to match the myriad of open-source programs?

So do you think that OpenUsability will NEVER achieve success?

Always is such a long time...

Sure thing, we could start a group - what do you say?

I've received a couple of mails from interested people - one of the guys pointed me to Openusability.Org.

But I had something else in mind, more of a group working who consult (for free, ofcourse) on one or two OSS projects at a time - but doing a good and complete job of it.

What do you think? If you're interested mail me at metlin - at - gmail.

However, on most OSS projects, if you don't code, you're a second-class citizen. There are regular threads every year on user experience lists about "why the OSS community should listen to us" that are filled with anecdotes of rejection by dev teams when a designer or usability person has tried to get involved.

I don't have any particular answers either, other than that I'm sure there are good OSS developers who would like UX design talent on the team - but there's not a real venue for getting them to work together, and there's not a culture of involving noncoders in most OSS projects.

Open Usability is trying to bridge the gap, but still has a long long way to go. (from getting profile in the OSS community and UX community to getting rid of the focus on 'usability' professionals and a focus on testing / evaluation)

KDE Usability Process Strenghtened
OpenUsability.org

Yeah, that is probably what should have been done. However, there weren't too many usability experts involved with OSS projects back in 1997 compared to developers.

There are more these days however; and as such, positive pushes in usability are on the way. The OpenUsability will be launched sometime in the future to get more HCI engineers involved with OSS. The website was founded by relevantive, the company that did the original usability tests with KDE 3.1 (and whose recommendations were implemented in KDE 3.2), but the website won't be specific to KDE, although it'll certainly be one focus of it.