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User Interfaces in Free Software

Posted by michael on from the too-many-widgets-spoil-the-desktop dept.

Havoc Pennington wrote a piece on creating good user interfaces, with special attention toward GNOME 2. See also the advogato thread.

2 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. GNOME Usability Study by nrosier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. OSS Startup Idea: SimpleFace by rbeattie · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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