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GNOME Ignoring its Own Users?
Jonathan writes "Some editorials were posted on the web the last few days about GNOME and its apparent lack of interest on user feedback, especially when GNOME pitches itself to follow a 'users first philosophy' in their press releases. OSNews started with an editorial about market research or lack thereof, Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."
It seems that /. is on a binge of Mozilla and GNOME rants. From all the different stories, I'm almost suprised that the mods haven't forked both projects themselves. With the amount of coverage given to the defects in the projects, the casual reader might think that the FOSS movement is dying.
I hear that somebody doesn't like the KDE development model, so let's see if that a news item in the next day or so.
--Excyl
Eugenia says:
In our article yesterday about "The Ten Worst Engineering Pitfalls" by Keith F. Kelly, on the No2 spot you will find this: "2. Basing the design on your own motives rather than on users' needs."
She uses this to argue that programmers should be user-driven -- but as Alan Cooper points out, this is exactly backwards. When a company is user-driven, they add a lot of little features and tweaks that each of their users asks for. Then they end up with a program that's intricate and complex and hard to use for *everybody*. (If it's a company, this is where their customers start leaving them for companies who take design seriously.)
No program (or system) can be perfect for all people. The successful ones are the ones that have a consistent design -- often this means doing one thing and doing it well. If you try to be all things to all people, you guarantee that you won't be much use to anybody. Attaching a shell to the bottom of every window is the ultimate in flexibility, but nobody would claim that it's the ultimate in usability.
The problem is that Eugenia seems to think "user-driven" is a good thing, whereas Cooper (who seems to have much more experience and success and believeable examples to back up his position) states quite emphatically that "user-driven" is a bad thing: you want to be *design-driven*.
- didn't post the judging criteria
- didn't use any judges other than those that run the footnotes site
- didn't listen to the feedback they received regarding the winning choice
- shunned a good amount of popular opinion
i could go on but i won't. i was a proud GNOME user for years until it seemed the GNOME developers stopped hearing our cries. for example - the gpilotd project failed and when the users cried out - no one seemed to listen. all the while the KDE developers were busy taking in all the feedback from their user base and, when their next version was released, it was obvious they took that feedback to heart. i honestly don't know what the issue is. GNOME used to be (from my point of view) the desktop of the "common man" for the Linux community. not so any more. now it's become about as user-unfriendly as possible (i.e. spatial file managers and hard-to-create desktop icons). when is this going to change? or is it? is KDE going to become the defacto standard for more and more users while GNOME finds itself being used only by those the develop it? it seems to me that GNOME is now what Linux was nearly a decade ago - a project for the elitist/hobbiest/hacker and not the masses.nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
As seen on OSNews
While you are at it Eugenia, your readers/users want
1). A better comment system for OSnews.
2). Registration based commenting.
3). Support for all XHTML tags (it's freaking 2005!)
4). A better moderation scheme.
5). A user friendly editor with spell checking and automatic tagging.
6). Ability to reply directly to comments with ugly @ in the reply field.
7). Ability to place certain trolls on an ignore list.
8). Ability to edit comments that have already been posted.
Oh and your users have been clamoring for these features for years. Why haven't you implemented them?