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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."
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.
(1) Always use the 4 corners of the screen, as well as the screen sides. Don't ever place anything that's interactive just a pixel shy of the screen-edge.
(2) Form follows function, not vica-versa. Don't focus on making an "appealing" UI. Focus on making one that works very well for the tasks at hand.
(3) Passive memory, not active. People have a huge capacity for passive memory, and can remember things passively very quickly (that is, they recognize it upon seeing it). Users already have enough stuff to memorize, so don't make them memorize bizarre key-combinations.
(4) For a guide to a desktop, see here (explanation here), and here (explanation here).
(5) Remember to have strong software-support. The reason I like Gentoo so much is because of the helpful and friendly message boards, as well as the excellent documentation.
(6) User testing, user testing, user testing. Grab someone and ask them if your program is easy to use. Sit them down in front of it -- without a manual -- and ask them to do something that the program was designed to do. If they can do it, then the program has good design. If not, bad design. If they can't do it, or if it took them a long time, ask them what they would expect, or where your program was confusing.
(7) Have context menu's for everything in your program with "send feedback on this". E.g., if someone right clicks on the menu-bar or a specific sub-menu, they send feedback on that. You thus instantly know what their feedback is about, and it makes it easy for them to send feedback.
(8) Actively seek out the opinions of those who download your program and use it. You can do this by creating a message board, newsgroup, etc, and specifically asking what they think about x, y, and z.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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.
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