Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is there a competiting website called . / now?
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
The weird thing is that I actually got to where I could read the whole thing backwards. Hmm, maybe I should try reading some hebrew sometime.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
I'm impressed with how far open source has come. From the days when you could spend a week trying to figure out what your monitor's horizontal refresh rate was just to get X running under Slackware, to the wizard-style installs of RedHat, the installation process (as mentioned in the article) has come a long way.
I just recently came back to try to set up a dedicated Linux server on an old PC. I was going to put some custom servlets on there, so I wanted Apache and Tomcat installed.
Apache came with the RedHat installation I did, but not Tomcat. No problem. I download an RPM of Tomcat and install it fairly easily (although I have to RTFM to figure out how to install the RPM).
After that, it took me three days to get Apache to talk to Tomcat. After installing, uninstalling, and finally compiling an entirely new build of Apache, I got the webapp connector to work, only to find it was broken. Some more futzing around and trying to read the broken-English documentation of the mod_jk2 connector and I finally got it working. I'm a developer with fifteen years' experience, I'm not a newbie here. I can fly circles around all but the most experienced vi user, but this was a baffling array of too many choices, not enough guidance, and no friendly setup.
Other usability problems I encountered included:
1. The graphical tool for configuring Apache provided by RedHat doesn't like you touching the config file with any other editor, but it doesn't provide all the functionality either. So, the minute you have to touch the config file with an editor, your user-friendly tool breaks.
2. I had three choices for everything. Did I want to use Tomcat as my main server? Integrate with Apache? What directories did I want to integrate? Which of three different connectors that do exactly the same thing did I want to use? (Hint: whichever one that just works). As a first-time user, I didn't want a choice, I wanted a decision.
In contrast, the first time I ever set up a servlet engine on a Windows NT box (and this was in the bad-old-days) the procedure was:
Double click installer, click next about five times, select "IIS" and hit "Finish." Took me less than an hour--the first time. Sure, it probably wasn't tuned to perfection, but it worked.
With the success of the Linux installers being so easy, it appears that usability is making inroads...but it's not there yet.