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:usability vs usefulness

[xutopia]

Usability doesn't mean common denominator like Windows XP does. It means building applications for the end user.

Programs like X-CD-ROAST are nearly unusable without documentation on the side. The *acceptance* of GIMP and blender only has to do with the fact that they are the only free programs that do what it sets out to do.

Programs that copy or build upon existing usable programs tend to do really well at being accepted really fast in the OSS community. Check out XMMS, Evolution or Firebird. Are their interfaces usable? Are their power immediatly recognized by the end user? Yes.

Something X needs..

[zcat_NZ]

Possibly the biggest thing that would improve usability, in my experience; When a user double-clicks an icon, make it DO SOMETHING immediately. Switch to an hourglass pointer or whatever, and keep it until the window actually opens. This is probably the only major issue my wife and kids have with Linux. They can't tell if the double-click did anything, so they doubleclick again until the windows(s) start opening.