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Usability and Open Source Software
Martin Soto writes "This article by two user interaction researchers, discusses many of the usability problems in current open source projects. The nice part is that, unlike many /. readers, it doesn't stop there, but goes into suggesting novel (at least for the OSS community) approaches to cope with those problems in an open source compatible way. Worth a read to those that, like me, still think that OSS should find its way to every desktop computer."
I suspect this is a troll but i'll bite...
Useability is something you add on the backend of a product to market it. What they really mean by useability is a nice GUI where you can get a mouse trail going.
No. You obviously know nothing about the subject. Usability is not something you hack onto the backend of a product after all is said and done. If you're serious about designing an application to be highly usable, then the interface becomes a central development point just as important as the actual functionality (perhaps more important because if you can't figure out how to use it and use it well, what good is it?). And to say that usability means just putting together a whizbang fancy GUI is a massive understatement. There is years of research on the human brain and how to best present information to it on which the principles of good GUI design are built. Sure, it's obvious to you now because you've had lots of experience with applications from which you can borrow concepts from, but at some point in the past someone had to ask the question "what is the best way to do this?"
What most people don't realize is that it's not just the "big" things like provide menus at the top of the screen, etc, but also little things that are taken for granted. You probably don't notice them but when they're not there you miss them. Ever used an application that just didn't "feel" right but you couldn't really explain why?
Useability is great in most OSS work, extremely efficient and powerful...it just has a higher learning curve to the uninitiated user
Here you contradict yourself. How can useability be great if the learning curve for a new user is high? Usability is about reducing that learning curve by making the interface intuitive (among other things).
In my biased opinion, the audio editor Audacity is a success story in OSS usability.
I've been working on this project for almost two years now, and the experience has completely shifted my priorities and my perspective in software development. Before I started working on Audacity, I had the mindset that I think many OSS programmers have of only caring about the capability and raw power of a program. I never really considered the non-programmer users a significant concern.
Audacity's project lead is Dominic Mazzoni, who is uniquely excellent at both programming and user interface design. He comes from a Mac background, a world where interfaces generally don't suck. From day one he was writing for maximum usability and maximum use. Doing simple things with Audacity is child's play. Dialogs and messages are written to be easy to understand. Audacity is portable to Windows/UNIX/MacOS9/MacOSX, so right off the bat the potential audience is much larger than an application written for only one platform.
There is an audacity-help list that is advertised in big letters on the web page. This is an open invitation to ask questions that most would see as newbie questions not worth their time. This gives us a chance to see what users are having a hard time understanding. Most of these questions are answered in a timely fashion, which means these users don't abandon Audacity.
Documentation is another area where Audacity shines. Tony Oetzmann has been writing some really excellent, concise, useful documentation.
As a result this focus on usability, a lot of people use Audacity. We're pretty consistently in the top 20 downloads on sourceforge. People write often to ask if they can incorporate Audacity on CD compilations. We've been reviewed in the Washington Post.
I've really come around on this in the last two years. Usability is worth it. Anyone can appreciate software that is usable, even programmers. This doesn't mean dumbing things down -- right now a feature is in the works that will allow a project to have a speed envelope, that will allow you to have the speed continuously vary (with appropriate resampling). This is a pretty advanced feature that most users would never have a use for. But a lot of thought is going into how to integrate it into the GUI in the best way possible. It's not going to just get bolted on.