OSS Usability Group Forming

cpfeifer writes "Tristan Louis has started a new group focusing on Usability in OSS products. Among the goals are: examining the state of he usability union in existing products, forming a set of standards and practices and PR for products that make usability strides. Also, check out the discussion on Metafilter."

Comments

Re:Thank you!

[TNLNYC]

That's what I thought too (I'm the one starting this) and was surprised that no one else had taken the job. Now to answer some questions.

Some people have asked why not use Apple's or *gasp* Microsoft's. Well, we can use some of their stuff but ultimately, I suspect that we can come up with something even better. There are a few things that people have complained about in terms of MS or Apple's stuff. However, I'm sure there are some common elements that could be reused.

My view is that there's a lot of innovation happening in OSS. Some of it can't be done using Apple's or MS's stuff. Some of it can. I'd like to give Kudos to the folks at the Gnome project, for example, for starting to look at good UI. Similarly, Lindows is working on simplifying things... From all of those efforts, we can prbaobly come up with a set of generally accepted guidelines that we can use as a shortcut.

On the dumbability of interface. Usability does not necessarily mean dumbing things down. One of the things I believe is that there can be some work done to accomodate both beginners and superusers. It may require extra work (some of the thing I'm thinking about are things like a setting in a pref's screen that would move a program from dumb user mode to superuser mode (like the Safari Enhancer, which unlocks Safari's extra features) or the advanced prefs tool for Mozilla.

There's much to do but I think that we can probably get some good stuff going if we start looking at this as a subset. I believe very strongly that the usability challenge is the last one we need to overcome in order to make inroads on the desktop. If an OSS OS (*hey, that sounds cool!*) is easier to use than OSX or Windows and costs less (FREE!!!) people will just jump to it :)