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OpenUsability and KDE: Cooperating on KPDF
sultanoslack writes "More from the world of usability in KDE -- there's an interview up where Albert Astals Cid, the KPDF maintainer, and Florian Grässle, a usability engineer from OpenUsability on working together to make KPDF more usable and some of the challenges in working together in a developer / usability engineer team. We've been seeing more from the OpenUsability folks lately, and they'll also be present doing a talk and staffing a booth this week at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Open Source conference." This interview-with-screenshots provides a neat look at the interaction of usability concerns and software development.
I certainly welcome this development. Usability is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind with a lot of open source software. This is an area that proprietary software companies still have an edge on because they're also in a position to pay for the extra work going into interface design.
Basically there are several aspects a good interface should fulfill -- like preventing errors before they happen and the user has to deal with them or giving the user control and freedom over the application (and not vice versa), offering an efficient interface and so on.
I'm not sure how errors can be prevented, assuming that they're not within control of the application. Does he mean design errors? Can someone explain?
see a Text Widget
The OpenUsability group is exactly what is needed in the Linux/open source community right now. Standards on how software should be layed out and behave is one of the major setbacks in the open source community. It seems as if just about everyone has their own version and great idea on how an application should be layed out. This is one reason (just one) why Windows will continue to have an edge in the desktop market. On Windows you can open just about any application and already know how to use it (at least, at the most basic level). If you've used Microsoft Word then you've got a head start on knowing Internet Explorer, Notepad, and Calc.exe.
"...if people respected copyright more, like you guys do with the GPL so religiously, [the DMCA] wouldn't be necessary."
What's the difference between Linux & OS X? Usability. And that makes all the difference. HUGE difference. KDE is great, Konqueror is nothing short of amazing in its versatility, but the lack of polish can really hurt Linux distributions. Do you want to spend your days trying to figure out why your scanner suddenly doesn't work well under the new Mandrake/Fedora/SuSe or do you want to use your scanner? Usability is important--even for Geeks--because allows you to accomplish what you need/want to do. If you enjoy trying to fix things, that's great, but most people need their computers for work/play and don't have the time or inclination to troubleshoot their main desktop computer.
The other day I downloaded Fedora Core 4 DVD to try it out.
Usability problems already began right at the installer. Below is some things I noticed that should probably have been fixed long time ago:
1) I noticed the installer was using gnome-themed Yes/No dialog boxes when it wanted to ask questions. The problem is, half of those dialogs used GTK2's Yes/No buttons (red/green circle) and the other half used GNOME's yes/no buttons - green enter symbol and a red X. This is very inconsistent and confusing to the user.
2) At a number of times, default option in a Yes/No dialog was not the "cancel" one but one which would make irreversible changes. This is not good - what if someone accidentally presses "enter" on a dialog like this?
3) Keyboard navigation, while present had several bugs. At one point, installer asked for a root password, and when I entered a "weak" password, it popped up a warning dialog about this. The problem is, after I dismissed the dialog (with a esc key), keyboard focus was no longer on the installer! (or anythign else for that matter, no amount of alt-tabbing or pressing tab would get the focus back on the installer. If someone without a mouse was running this, at this point they have no other choice but to abort the install and start from beginning.
There was some other issues, but these are all I can remember off hand, and remember, this is just in the OS installer (GUI) itself! I can't imagine how much worse it gets once the system is installed and gets used. So, to make a long story short, any kind of cooperation to take usability one step higher is certainly welcome. Unfortunately this is only for a single KDE app, which isnt really unique in its function, but any change is better than nothing.