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Jakob Nielsen Talks About Usability in FOSS
dokey writes "In an interview with Builder AU, usability expert Jakob Nielsen gives his opinion of usability in Free and open source software. The article echoed what Jon "Maddog" Hall said earlier this year in a keynote at Linux.conf.au -- "Programmers Are From Mars, Users/Managers/Companies are from Venus". Is it time to pay more attention to end-users?(who aren't geeks)"
The attitude of "It works, don't care if you don't like how it works or if you think it's ugly, I like it, if you don't like it than don't use it" is not just in FOSS, it's the attitude of many, if not most, programmers. Despite what it may look like, this isn't flamebait, I'm one of these guys myself. At the company I work for, this attitude is prevalent to a degree in most of the developers. It takes someone outside their heads (and usually, pressure from someone who makes the decisions) to put a friendly face on the application, and, dare I think it, reduce or refactor functionality to present a better interface to the user.
It's not that developers aren't to blame, but rather, it's how you'd expect developers to be. What FOSS needs is a free, open-source equivalent of the QA/Validation/UI Design department.
> The reason is, the motivation for open source is
> not because the person gets paid but the person
> gets prestige. The developers are designing for
> each other and they are so feature rich--geeks
> love features--and you get more prestige by adding
> features. For the average person fewer features is
> better and easier to understand.
This has been a constant battle on POPFile. People are forever asking me for this option, or that option, which are useful to a user community consisting of themselves and the two other people in the world who want the same thing. I've been argued with strenously for not adding various features and in general to innovating in the UI really slowly, but the lesson is clear: the average user should be guided by the software to the right behaviour. POPFile does have 100s of special options and they are available in a cfg file that a geek can get at.
The other problem with open source and GUIs are all the people who want things in very specific places. e.g. I got constant "Put button X at the top, no, put button X at the bottom, no put it at the top and bottom" type conversations. Finally, we've boiled the UI down to the things that most people like and anyone else can hack the HTML templates and make the UI just as they want it.
Overall, we've settled on:
1. Lots of flexibility exposed at the geek level
2. The every day functionality exposed in the UI.
There's still a lot to do to make POPFile's UI really friendly, but the biggest lesson has been to resist the power users when it comes to adding UI widgets.
John.
I think the state of OSS GUIs is better than he claims. A lot of work with regard to usability has gone into the major (!) projects like Gnome or KDE. That still does leave us with quite a few crappy OSS GUIs, but it doesn't really make sense to try to come up with some average value in this case.
A study on this could be interesting.
From TFA:
/. still dispute that view.
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The second problem is that open source when they turn to the general tools they tend to be in the line of "let's implement what we already know" so they will take Microsoft Office and they will clone it. Since we've been criticising Microsoft for years for cloning Apple it is only fair to criticise open source for cloning Microsoft. The point being that you don't move ahead but you have to do something new.
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Very nicely said - he's not the first or the last to say this, but I am puzzled how many in the OSS community and on
Of course, that is not only obvious but potentially dangerous from the legal perspective.
If/when OSS software gets close to endangering some big commercial software, I think this cloning thing will be the first the ISV will present to the court.
BTW, the Pope said something against cloning yesterday - was he complaining about OSS?
I prefer a geek switch, or rather, a series of geek switches that turn the software from being a usable piece of software into a controllable piece of software. You must understand some people will NEVER want to switch into geek mode. I know my parents would never sacrifice usability for features. By the same token some geeks may know the author of the software well and be able to guess how to control the software and may never use an easier mode. Many games have this feature (RTS) so I'd really like to see it in programs.
The one mistake many programmers make it requiring people to accept things they do not want. Perhaps I want control X but not control Y. Many programs would force you to take both or neither. This must always be circumvent-able without resorting to geekhood.
It just occured to me why I dislike the "spatial" nature of the new Gnome.
#1) It is just like DOS. You can only be 'active' in one directory at a time. Deep dir's were hell, but shallow ones were kinda quick and easy to copy/move files around and open them.
#2) The entire "browser" style has lasted only because Suzie Soccermom has never learned that by using a "Tree-view + detailed list" is easier, (damn Windows default settings).
#3) IIRC Xtree, Norton Commander and Dosshell were all designed to quickly & easily allow of folder/file manipulation at the deep level. This is a huge improvment over the existing DOS CLI.
Is this really just a case of: "What is old is new again"?
Like a previous poster stated. Spatial systems would work very good for large numbers of files, if the OS did all the sorting for you. (Didn't MS try this with "My Documents, My Pictures, My P0rn..." and we all hated them dearly for it?)
Here's a novel idea, let's make the choices EASILY switchable. Include 999999999 different choices and let the end-user decide.
Damnit that's the mess that we have with any linux distro installer.
Ok, how about the Model-T Ford method: "You can have any colour you want as long as it's black."
Apple beat us to that one too.
ok I give up. Maybe I just go "roll my own". And no I am not talking about linny.
=) I love Mondays
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
"But linux is already there for me (mandrake 10)"
In a default install of Mandrake 10, KMail now displays the images in spam (I prefer just the source-code so I can delete it quicker), it puts a big red header at the top of each HTML message filling the preview pane with something unrelated to the message, it's got a crap default font, it has icons next to each menu item making it more difficult to read, it might have slightly-transparent menus making it difficult to read, the default icons are so bland you can't see what's what (they're all bluish-white circles), I'm not sure it's possible to insist on always-non-HTML outgoing mail, XChat is now ugly, MandrakeUpdate doesn't work, rpmdrake does work, but displays error messages even when it succeeds, and it displays dialog-boxes when you start it "I'm about to run rpmdrake, okay?" - "yes, dammit, that's why I typed rpmdrake, duh!". 3-hour install time, advertising during the installer and an end-user license agreement. Didn't configure X properly, and X crashed with "no screens found" first time I ran it. Mouse-wheel doesn't work, extra buttons on the mouse don't seem to be setup to do anything, WindowMaker has a crap default configuration with useless mandrake menus and an ugly config. Text-mode terminals have a distracting white star in the corner of each screen, no matter what you're doing. Default X terminal seems to be Konsole, the slowest program ever, takes about 20 seconds to load on my machine for a console. Xterm doesn't seem to have been installed by default, neither was kppp (the internet dialler, would be nice), neither was kedit. No I didn't use "individual package selections", I've wasted too many hours in there before. New KDE theme is as horrible as the fonts, and good luck finding how to change it from if you're not in KDE at the time (it's 'kcontrol', I should note to myself, and 'gnome-control-center'). There doesn't seem to be any way of turning off the "send this picture" menu in mozilla which is so annoying to hit by accident, nor the "close other tabs" menu, cause of many a day's lost work. Oh, and KMail must have sprouted a new menu or something, because I always seem to have trouble finding anything in what used to be a nice clear layout.
Did I mention that I use KMail so many hours per day that making it even slightly harder to use is a big kick in the teeth from the people working on default configuration at Mandrake? Or that I use rxvt frequently enough that disabling the WindowMaker icon to open a terminal after you've used it once is frustrating enough to make you want to install gentoo, even if it takes you a month of downloading?
And that's just the stuff which has changed since the "quite nice but crashes with a USB key" Mandrake 9 (apart from the EULA which was always offensive). Seriously, I use Mandrake all the time, it's the best OS I've found so far, but after installing Mandrake 10, I've spent nearly every waking hour looking at pictures of Apple iMacs, and counting the cash required to buy one.
Does this comment even get 10 minutes before disappearing beneath the waves of moderation?