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Improving GUIs In Open Source?
frekio asks: "I'm a 4th year undergrad at UCSD and am taking part of an ambitious cognitive science course that moves us, as groups, to redesign an interface with cognitive processes, usability and efficiency in mind. My idea was to contribute to Open Source with this project by assisting in a GUI design/redesign. We need to work with something that has an active user community which could provide feedback about changes we made or propose, and therefore must have a decently large userbase. What are some projects out there that provide software which people use day-to-day and could use more time and effort put into the User Interface?"
Add accessibility to GNOME. Right now, GNOME does not work well if you cannot see, for instance. All sorts of things need to be done to help out. Furthermore, there are loads of research into accessibility for GUIs to use as reference material. This wouldn't affect the average Dick or Jane, but would have a tremendous impact on the vision-impaired. Let's make Linux the preferred platform for the disabled!
--Be human.
Before problems with software user interfaces can be solved, we must solve the problems with the hardware interfaces. The mouse needs to be eliminated; it's great for slow people who don't know how to use a computer but it slows down those of us who know what information we want. However what the replacement would be is debatable. I like pen based interfaces (not for writing, for pointing) but that doesn't work well with the current fashion in PC 'stacking' (stacking the monitor on the desk, perpendicular to the desks surface).
Perhaps we need to ask the question, "do we really need to point in order to compute?" and if the answer is "yes" then how should we best point, and if the answer is "no" then what should be changed.
It's too bad this question isn't on the main page. There is lots of good open source projects out there that would be that much better if they had a better UI.