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User Interfaces in Free Software
Havoc Pennington wrote a piece on creating good user interfaces, with special attention toward GNOME 2. See also the advogato thread.
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Interesting article, or set of opinions.
The major stumbling block I see in free desktop software is it's inability to innovate much further than win32 or MacOs, but there's a reason for that.
It's called familiarity - to innovate too far, would be to alienate users, so it has to be a gradual process.
KDE and Gnome have improved enormously, but they are still lacking the cohesive feel that win32 and MacOS desktops have. IOW, things like keyboard shortcuts, copy and pasting text between applications etc. are virtually universal between all different applications.
The question should be asked, are features like transparent window borders, animated icons, slide-out-menus really neccessary for a productive desktop ?
Shouldn't more development time be put into creating an efficient, robust and stable work-horse desktop and less time on the fancy bits ?
There's another aspect to this - the UI 'hobbyist' or 'tinkerer' - the very people who support and participate in the development of free UI's sometimes seem to loose the most important idea behind a good UI - the end user. Much time is spent on the idea that 'total customisation' should be the end goal - is this flawed thinking ?
How many people really want to customise thier UI to the 9th degree ? - surely the majority of people simply want a plain and effective UI that helps there productivity ?
More customisation = more code = more bugs = slower UI
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
The guys at work had a chuckle at the iarchitect.com User Interface Hall of Shame. If companies like Microsoft weren't featured it wouldn't be half the fun!
Everyone enjoys a scape goat; I noticed that a lot of university professors also reference this site in their online GUI course notes!
Anyone know of any other good "chambers of GUI horrors".
Torturé par la fenêtre.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
Why? Because I use Windows NT all day long at work, so that's what I'm used to. Like the qwerty keyboard, 'doze UI may not be the best, but is what most people are most familiar with. This is not a silly attempt to generate flames. I think there is some merit to just conceding the "look and feel" battle to M$ and concentrating on areas where there is a competitive advantage, like security, or just developing quality free software, with no privacy-transgressing EULAs.
Of course, tinkering with window managers and desktop setups is still a fun pastime. :)
Didn't the Gnome Usability study done by Sun cover a lot of the shortcomings of the current GUI? It showed that the GUI was indeed created by geeks for geeks.
The report can be found here.
I've read many programmers views and opinions of UI. What they say and what they do are two different things. I mean, i'm about as qualified as any programmer to comment on UI but no matter what Havoc or anyone says about Gnome and it's usability I disagree terribly.
1. Things are as usable and only usable when people can generally agree on operation or functionality. If only 10 people agree on usability no matter how smart you believe you are, it won't be usable. The most usable applications, cars, planes, clocks, or whatever got that way through the users being able to say, "I want this and I want that". Just because you don't think it's a good idea or it will slow down performance or whatever doesn't mean you should keep those ideas out or wait to act upon them, especially simple things. This is what I see on the Gnome usability list.
2. There is no such thing as a beginner, intermediate or advanced user when it comes to usability. Sure, people need to become accustomed to a new interface but the interface should always be made so that a total newbie could walk by and get the hang of it in little to no time at all.
3. Suns usability team created CDE; have you used CDE? Was it usable to you? Ok.. I won't talk about that anymore and no offense to the Usability guys I'm sure you know more about this than I do but CDE just was not a usable product.
If you want usability in gnome I think you have to start with the basic shit. Like havoc said no one likes doing mundane work but until I'm able to drag something from Nautilus or GMC into my menu or for that matter edit my menu without being root Gnome is less usable.. It's the tiny things that count and I think that Gnome in general has neglected the tiny little things.
Would you rather jump through your window to get out of your car or use a latch mechanism to open the door?
Okay, I was thinking about this offline and I wanted to add that there's a perfect opportunity here for an OSS startup:
Give it a cool name like "SimpleFace" or something non-frightening like that (i.e. real words).
Then this company would do three things (complying to KISS):
1) Create a set of rules and guidelines for GUI applications along the lines of Apple's Human Interface guidelines. Include all of the most recent theories and practice. Publish this online. Use versions so that people can tell what's the latest draft, etc.
2) Certify apps that comply to the SimpleFace rules. Open Source Software gets certified for free. Certify non-free software for a fee. They get to put a SimpleFace smile icon on their web pages or boxes.
3) Create a set of classes - both online and corporate training - based on the guidelines. Some for free, others for a fee.
Once momentum started building on something like this, corporations would be more willing to switch to OSS software if they knew that training was going to be minimized because the apps that use the SimpleFace guidelines would be easy to use for those already familiar with other SimpleFace apps.
SimpleFace could also actively participate in the other projects as a GUI testing center. Whereas the rest of the OSS crowd might not pay attention to usability and design issues, SimpleFace would be there to help out. Providing feedback, suggestions, or even app dev for those interested.
Why am I thinking "startup" and not just "movement" or "organization?" because I think that something like this is needed now before the OSS movement loses any more momentum in the UI race from companies like M$ and Apple. (Under the theory that a startup could move faster than a committee.) How many Unix heads do YOU know that are switching to Mac OSX because their GUI is awesome? Lots.
-Russ
Me
Bertrand Meyer wrote a very interesting book, and designed a very interesting language. When I'm trying to do what he thought was proper and important, I like the language a lot and appreciate it's elegance and design. When I'm trying to do something that he either didn't think was proper or important, I find it intolerable.
...
His design principles lead one to construct things which always work. And depend on things which always work. Good approximations are not allowed. When and where this works, it's great. When and where it doesn't
E.g.: He disallows the overloading of operators, because the type of the operand is not an always reliable method for disambiguating the meaning. And he's right, it isn't. But it works most of the time, and in Eiffel (his language) one could create separate types for degrees_Centigrade and degrees_Farenheit, and thus disambiguate those arguments. But because a float could be either, he disallows overloading.
Where he to strictly follow his own rules, he would say that because a user interface cannot be guaranteed to work for everyone, you shouldn't have one. He's not that self consistent, but that's the only thing that saves him.
Everyone should read his book. But then they should immediately try to read a file with multiple types of data items in it that have different interpretation rules depending on the content. (Say a CVS file, where some of the fields may contain internal carriage returns.)
I always pretend to know my target audience. I just know that it's a pretense. So I try to cluster the possible incompatibilities into a cluster (or at least place an easily findable mark by them). This allows me to get the first version out in a reasonable amount of time, but still enables me to go back and adapt for a more general case on an "if needed" basis. (So far I haven't needed two. Most of my applications have a very small audience [around 20 people]. But this is a "be prepared" kind of thing that I can do with minimal cost. The other would involve either massivley expensive software purchases or considerably more work.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The real problem is age and how "applications" are taught in schools, the enterprise and classes.
Schools teach children to use applications specifically. No one sits down and explains to them the concept of a file and actions that apply to a file (open, save, save as, print...) or editing (copy, cut, paste, etc.. )
If the process of educating people in the realm of computer use included a more abstract view of computers and how they work, the average joe schmo wouldn't need to "relearn" every time a new UI design came out, they'd be able to reason through it.
We moved our 8 year old daughter and 14 year old son from Windows to SuSE and Gnome, respectively. With the exception of not knowing the names of applications that do what she wants, she can get around just fine because we've taught her the basics, without being specific to an OS. She knows how to manipulate files and open applications, she understands that web browsers and can use IE, Netscape, opera or Galeon with equal ease.
This ease of adaptation is partially due to commonlality of UI implementation across applications and platforms, and partially due to their education @ home, which focuses on exploration and understanding the computer rather than a specific application.
Of course, if schools/enterprises did that, M$ would lose its edge because users would no longer be frightened to death when presented with a word processing app other than Word, or a browser other than IE.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
IMO the UI of KDE is getting too complex (I know it better than Gnome). So the task is to clean it up, give useable defaults and simplify it. Especially the KDE-menu and the KontrolCenter should be cleaned up.
But what should be removed? What is a good default? Let's ask the user. KDE could collect information on what is used and how the prefs are set, and send it back to the developers.
I think noone would have a problem with that as long as: The info is anonymous, only sent with explicit consent, and it is stated clearly what information is sent.
I've heard many such arguments before, but I can't help thinking that you're mixing up a good idea (simplify the menu system) with a particular implementation that you're stuck on (top-of-screen menus, a la MacOS). How about a single, context-sensitive menu accessed from a right-click with the mouse? No, wait, we've already got one of those. So, how about having an application menu and a context menu off a right-click, with subsequent right-clicks alternating between them? And so on...
While I'm not necessarily advocating any of these ideas as "better" than the top-of-screen layout, they would appear, at least superficially, to have many of the same advantages you cite in your article: reduced clutter, easy to find (always where your mouse pointer is, some eye-catching animation to make it obvious when you click?), etc. Surely what is needed is a comparison between not just the status quo and a top-of-screen system, but between many different basic ideas, to see which are more intuitive and easy to use for the guy in front of the keyboard/mouse?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.