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I'm not new to Linux desktops, I've been using them on and off since RedHat 7.2. I've used ready-out-of-the-box distros and customized, compiled from scratch distros (e.g. Gentoo).

Recently I've stopped using them because I found myself increasingly productive on Windows Vista and I also find it much better in terms of screen real estate than the themes I've found for the common widget toolkits used in KDE and Gnome (blasphemy, I know).

One day I'll switch 100% to the Linux/Unix desktop, even if I'd need to create my own desktop environment. I'm just not yet ready for the future, I guess :)

Btw, I like your theme

bangs head on keyboard Ugh. That parenthetical remark was supposed to be here:

One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this).

What gets me is that I proofed the posting several times and still missed this.

It is in fact probably the case which is relevant to your data-entry example, as IIRC most DE software of the time simply used the tab key to move from field to field and the return to finish a record (which most Windows DE software will also do, BTW; just because you can use the mouse doesn't necessarily mean you must).

Oh, and the first link should have been:

Usability in Website and Software Design

I didn't know what it was either. Apparently it's software that helps manage to efforts of groups of people, allowing them to collaborate on projects. So it's exactly what's needed for a distributed OSS project. Refer to useability first for some details.

Good rant! ;-) But that only applies to software designed to by used by its programmer. (It doesn't need to be open sourced, nor all OSS is meant for that use). My points are valid for software designed to be used by other people who don't want to learn the inner details of the whole system (something that OSS can be).

Now, once it's working, then refine and refactor to make the conceptually-simple things simple.
That could be a good idea if not for the fact that it's impossible to build a good UI with that strategy. Refine & refactoring is a software design strategy, which leads to good code structure and maintainability; but for good interaction design, the only valid strategy is early prototiping with real user testing (or major software redesign: dropping completely the old interface and building a new one from scratch). The user conceptual model for an application is the first thing that must be precisely defined, before writing a single line of code or class diagram; and this user model will be different from that of the implementor.

Sadly this is a fact that seem impossible to teach to most OSS developers; and even when they try to put user feedback, they do it in a wrong "feature bloat" way instead of a proper goal-task-tool analisys.

Have you ever heard of Fitt's Law? Perhaps you should read up on it.

"Wired, I'm ashamed."

Wired, I for one am proud of you. You Googled. You interviewed and quoted real people (instead of just stating the author's opinions as if they were fact). You cited Wikipedia. You even embedded your links! If the rest of the online news sites would just do these simple tasks, the world would be a much better place. ;)

The observations are a direct consequence of a well known usability heuristic called Hick's Law. Hick's Law states (roughly) that the time an individual requires to make a decision increases with the number of alternatives available.

It's the reason Macs have a single menu bar, at the top of the screen. It seems to me to also be a key thought behind the dock.

Actually the reason for that is due to Fitt's Law. The menu bar (and the Dock) are at the very edges of the screen so that the user has to do less work pin-pointing the cursor on a target.

Granted the Apple menu is always in the same place, then the menu item following which represents the application's name menu is too. After that however, different menus may be in different location from app to app.

Your point does play a role, but the menu's at the top mostly to reduce time to target.

• Jakob Neilson
• Usable Web
• Web Word
• Bruce Tognazzini
• User Interface Engineering
• Usability First
• Microsoft Usability