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Usability Eye for The GIMP Guy
TuringTest writes "The GIMP has recently signed up for
evaluation by OpenUsability.org. 'Many user interface decisions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design. In order to improve this, we need the help of experts. To find them, GIMP has joined
the OpenUsability project. Here's a platform where Open Source developers and usability experts get together.' They also report their first experiences with the paper prototyping of a new Import PDF dialog."
1 - You want a GUI which looks like Photoshop? Get Gimpshop and stop whining! 2- Now, what about comparing GimpShop to Photoshop?
You, sir, do not understand usability. Usability is *not* having 10,000 options for the user to customize and play with. Usability, in the strictest sense, is having an interface such that a user can pick it up *without* having to dig through options.
Here's something else you're missing - the type of people Gnome is targeting *DO NOT CARE* about 95%+ of the settings that would require opening GConf to change. For these users, it's far better to have a tool layout such that finding basic options does not require digging through 4 layers of option dialogues.
I'm not saying Gnome is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, simply that the majority of people on Slashdot who complain about Gnome being 'ruined' just plain do not understand how difficult seemingly simple tasks are for the average user. I mean, really, I've been using Linux since around '99, and run KDE from time to time just to see how they're progressing, and it almost always ends up with me digging through the control panel searching for things that should be rather simple to change because KDE exposes too many options for the average user.
Sure, if you're a geek and enjoy playing with all your settings, more power to you. But for people who simply want to use their computer, the KDE Control Panel is a confusing mess. So I'd really take issue with the idea that KDE is improving at an "impressive rate." If they spent more time cleaning up the Control Panel and building in HAL tools instead of adding huge oversized tooltips and calling it a usability improvement, I might be able to agree.
The changes that have been made to Gnome (for the most part) were not mistakes. It was a deliberate decision to move toward an interface that's more usable to a computer neophyte. Argue that the KDE interface is 'familiar' all you want, but the idea behind usability is that you don't *need* to be familiar with it to figure out how to do what you want.