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How To Fix the Poor Usability of Free Software
flosofl writes "Matthew Paul Thomas has an entry on his blog called Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, And How To Improve It. While this advice is helpful and may indeed lead to improvements in many open source programs, the guidelines may be much more difficult for smaller projects. From the entry, 'Free Software has a long and healthy tradition of "show me the code." But when someone points out a usability issue, this tradition turns into "patches welcome," which is unhelpful since most designers aren't programmers. And it's not obvious how else usability specialists should help out.'" Thomas has been developing the ideas in this essay for years. The critique is comprehensive, listing 15 challenges in the way software projects, and in particular free software projects, are structured, with suggestions for improving each one.
Agreed. Understanding usability is a totally different discipline to coding. One can easily do either without being able to do the other. The problem is that proper solutions to usability problems need proper foundations laid. Complaints about the foundations of usability tend to fall on deaf ears in the Free Software community -- certainly those who care are in the minority.
John_Chalisque
You're confusing graphic design and UI design. They're completely separate disciplines.
Most UI designers I've met are not good graphic designers, and most good graphic designers I've met are not good UI designers.
OpenUsability
I used to work at the company which started it. It's a platform for free software developers to meet usability specialists, and so far it's coming quite good. The KDE 4 HIG was designed by us ("us" as i still used to work there at the time this was done), and the people working there are certainly bright minded people, but there's always friction at the implementation front. In my experience it's not neccessarily easy to convince a developer that a given usability decision is the right one, even if someone with a background in usability makes the proposal.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
This post really annoyed me.
Go to http://bugs.kde.org/ and have a look at the types of bug reports we get and look at the responses.
I personally work on the task manager. I get around 1 bug report a day. Out of them, perhaps 1 in 20 is a suggestion for improving usability. And I have never received anything approaching a UI design document.
I have registered my app on www.openusability.org as well as with the internal kde usability group, and I browse forums for suggestions. And despite all this, I _still_ have not found a usability expert who has time to work on this app.
For the whole of the KDE project we have I think only 1 (maybe 2?) trained usability experts. There is far more demand than supply.
The fact is that people are willing to bitch about some app not being usable, but they are far less likely to put the effort into trying to come up with a good alternative solution and work with developers to get it implemented.