Advice for Developers: Make Common Usage Easy

Ken Hendrickson writes "Thomas Sowell has some fantastic common-sense advice for software developers from the viewpoint of an ordinary user: Make it easy to do what almost everybody wants to do. I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"

Comments

It's tough....

[Mz6]

"There are cameras with features that you will never use -- and that will never get in the way of your taking a picture. Some of these are complex computerized cameras that have a "program" button you can press, so that you can take a picture without having to slog your way through innumerable options."

Since it seems he's used this camera analogy throughout the article I'll comment on this little blurb. I'm not so sure it's a very good analogy to use either. The fact is that if you want better pictures, you NEED to go through all of those "useless" features and change them. All of those values will change depending on the conditions, the lighting, and the activity your photographing. If there are those people that DONT care about those features, get the one-use ones. Hell, they even have digital one-time use camera now.

"Your automobile may have a global positioning system and other high-tech stuff, but you don't have to work your way through it before you can turn the key in the ignition and drive away. You don't have to work your way through all the options on your television set before you can turn it on and watch a ballgame."

Using the GPS and the automobile are not really related in that way. However, before using the GPS (not the car) you do need to setup a few features before using it. For example, adding the location for your house, the area in which you live or will be searching for addresses to. Now, if you want to complain about GPS and features/setup, let's talk about how they need to ALL be voice activated or touch screens capable...

As far as Televisions go.. this really isn't the case anymore. With more and more high-end TVs taking over the market and as they continue to do so in the future, thanks in part to HDTV, there will be a brutal setup process just to turn it on and start watching any kind of TV.

The point is that these devices/programs are being made for just about everyone they need to adapt to everyone's skill level. In the case of software development, it doesn't make sense to create several different versions of software with different default options turned on or off. A lot of the times this software has to be scaled to many different types of users on both ends of the spectrum. As a software developer myself, I try to make things as easy as possible that once the program is loaded they can begin their intended task. However, this may not always be possible all of the time.

I do agree with the following though... Stupid bundled software.

"It seemed like a simple thing to buy some new software with these reference works to put into a new laptop. But so much audiovisual stuff had been added, to make looking something up in an encyclopedia seem like a trip through Disneyland, that just installing it took so much time that it made my computer guru late getting home for dinner."

Re:It's tough....

[rjstanford]

Using the GPS and the automobile are not really related in that way. However, before using the GPS (not the car) you do need to setup a few features before using it. For example, adding the location for your house, the area in which you live or will be searching for addresses to. Now, if you want to complain about GPS and features/setup, let's talk about how they need to ALL be voice activated or touch screens capable...

What? Oh, please. This is exactly the kind of problem that we have in a lot of software, especially smaller projects. First of all, why should I tell the car where I live just because I want to find the nearest Taco Bell? A perfect (although unintended) example.

As far as Televisions go.. this really isn't the case anymore. With more and more high-end TVs taking over the market and as they continue to do so in the future, thanks in part to HDTV, there will be a brutal setup process just to turn it on and start watching any kind of TV.

My TV has an annoying tendency to go into a reconfigure-me mode if its been without power for too long. Oddly enough, it never loses its settings (weird). Anyway, you know what I do? Its the equiv. of Next->Next->Next->Next->OK but more annoying.

Even if it did lose its settings, instead of prompting me to check the convergence it could just power on with a set of defaults. Probe to see if a coax is attached. If it is, check to see if there are channels with signals on them. Check to see if there are powered devices on the line-in and component-in ports. All of that. Then it could stick a little note up in the main menu that says, "You have not performed advanced configuration yet. Doing so will result in a superior picture. Press (X) to configure your TV." Or something.

Umm

[Gentoo Fan]

that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!

When "Free Software" has a sizable amount of the desktop market then I think we can say that. Until then, how many years has it been "this year for desktop linux!"???

Joel has a little bit about this idea too

[BayBlade]

I found it a good read here

No menus

[12357bd]

What about trying to learn from games, and for example; stop using menus? Those small labels on the upper part of the windows, there are a lot, but we seldom use a few of them.

Ergonomic interfaces don't present more than a few options at a time, if my memory es corerct there were studies about using more than 7 options as being confusing. If few options are presented, you don't need menus.

It's hard to make things easy

[p3d0]

As an ideal, software should make simple things simple, and complex things possible. Both of these require talent, but the former is certainly the less glorious and more thankless. If you are highly skilled, and design your software meticulously with usability in mind, you can make a software task appear so simple that users wonder why it took you so long to write.

FireFox gets it right...

[Apathetic1]

This is something I think FireFox has gotten very right. Don't want to mess around with settings? Great. It works right out of the box.

I've installed FireFox for about a dozen people now. So far only two have even bothered to open the Options dialog. They don't care how the options are set, as long as they can browse. The two who have opened the Options dialog think the customizability is great but those two are not the majority of users.

Free Software can out-ease-of-use Microsoft?

[JessLeah]

Yeah... right. I LOVE free software, and I HATE Microsoft (crap, I run Debian and OpenBSD _ONLY_), but let's be freaking realistic here. If free software is so easy to use, then why did I have to send THIS email to the OpenOffice users' mailing list this morning:

Subject: scalc: How do you select WHICH row or column is the X or Y axis???

Yes, I have viewed Help. Yes, I have Googled for more information. Yes, I have searched the FAQ.

But for the life of me, I cannot figure out-- and this sounds really dumb, I know-- how to tell scalc "Use column A, 'Amount', as the Y-axis, and column B, 'Date/Time', as the X-axis'.

I am trying to have OOo do a very SIMPLE line graph here-- how much money is in my account, graphed against time. Very very basic stuff, the kind of thing they teach to fifth graders. I cannot manage to convince scalc to do it.

And God help me if I wanted to keep 'Date' and 'Time' in separate columns, and have the software know to parse a single row's 'Date' and 'Time' cells as one date/time object...

Can someone please, please, please tell me how to do this? In M$ Excel, it's really really easy. You just tell it which column to use as which axis. It's so simple even a 10-year-old could understand it. IN OPENOFFICE.ORG YOU ARE NOT EVEN GIVEN THAT OPTION! You ARE given a billion different choices as to how you want the chart to LOOK, and by diddling with the chart object once it's in the 'sheet, you can give it a spiffly gradient effect, or change the labels on the axes...

But nowhere can you actually tell it what variables (read: columns) the axes should be bound to????

Just as an aside, I am really going nuts here, and pondering just going to Microsloth Office (running in CrossOver, as I run Debian). I appreciate the effort thot everyone has put into OOo, but seeing as how I CAN figure out how to insert a 3D rainbow-coloured torus into my spreadsheet, but I CANNOT figure out how to do a simple line graph, I'm kind of miffed at the moment. It would seem that the people who handle 'useability' had their priorities hat on backwards? ;) I mean, are rainbow-coloured tori really more important than line graphing? ;)

read Sowell's other articles too!

[RussP]

Wow! That makes my day. An article by Thomas Sowell featured on slashdot! He's a great writer, and he happens to be a conservative black too. Please read some of his other articles too while you're at it.