UI Designers Hired by Mozilla

ta bu shi da yu writes "Mozilla has hired several developers from Humanized. According to Ars Technica, Humanized is a "small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new projects.""

Comments

Re:More Raskins

[Evil Adrian]

Google Desktop does this too -- I actually realized that Launchy was totally redundant once I installed Google Desktop, so I removed it. Launchy is great, though.

Re:More Raskins

[xtracto]

Considering the popularity of Launchy (Win), Vista's start search, Quicksilver/Spotlight (Mac), Katapult (KDE) and GNOME Deskbar, I'd say he either hit a home run or knows trends when he sees them.

And this brings me to the question of, why aren't the menu and windows keys binded by default in many of the most popular linux distributions?, here I am writing this in Fedora 8 and neither the menu or any of the two windows keys of the keyobard do anything. The same thing happens in Ubuntu 7.10.

Now, I know there is a super-duper easy way to bind them in X/Y/Z menu or editing certain.conf file, but these keys are in almost every keyboard nowadays and they have specific functions (one open the sytem menu, the other opens the "alternative button" menu. And moreover, if they are binded by default and there is some keyboard that does not have them, it won't hurt the user in any way!

Re:good

[filbranden]

Office and ribbon are a good example.

Actually Office 2007 is one of my pet peeves. Incidentally, Microsoft nowadays seems to be breaking all UI standards just for the sake of the change. For instance, you can see several rants on Vista's new Windows Explorer, IE7's lack of menu bar, and Office's infamous ribbon.

Funnily enough, sometime ago, the excuse not to adopt non-MS technology was that the interface doesn't follow Windows guidelines, it doesn't integrate with Windows as well as Microsoft applications (this was always a complaint with Lotus Notes on a company I worked for).

Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore. Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[mwvdlee]

You'd be surprised by how easily people are confused by this.

Create a butt-ugly program where every feature is easy to find and compare it with a beautiful interface where every button is hidden behind layers of hoops. Most people will claim the beautiful one is more usable.

I've seen this while developing games; you can have all the gameplay finished and finetuned but not until the game has nice pictures instead of placeholders will they consider it "playable", even if you tell them you've yet to make it pretty.

This begs the question whether an open source project should be more concerned about looking usable or actually being usable. For commercial software, looks usually sell better than functionality. Sad but true. FOSS doesn't need to sell financially.