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.

Comments

A matter of time?

[The Ancients]

Perhaps this article signifies the movement that has occurred with open source software. Whilst I'm sure it's been around a long while, there has been a huge increase in what's available in the last few years. Open Source software is maturing as most things do when they get older.

I'm happy with the 'get it working first - then make it pretty' approach taken by most.

New design paradigm required

[gilgongo]

I am a UI designer by trade, and many is the time I have thought about wading in to a F/LOSS project in order to improve the usability of the interface (last one I considered was IPCop). While I agree with most of TFA, it doesn't seem to emphasise the real point for me, which is that UI design for free software requires radically different skills *from the designer* to that which are necessary in the commercial world.

Because people are so tolerant of awful UI, good UI designers are all about persuasion, charm, leadership and inclusiveness without losing focus. To achieve this commercially is not easy, but at least somebody has hired you in an expectation that you will do this work. Grabbing a bunch of elite coders and trying to persuade them to change their stuff is a massive challenge, even if you have VoIP, virtual whiteboards, etc. I would not expect maintainers to understand, appreciate or tolerate my intervention, mainly down to the reasons the article cites, and I'm not sure I'd be able to persuade them otherwise. Usability is not obvious and often requires a leap of faith, an abandonment of the wrong kind of complexity, and very often a lot of pain.

Still, the more we have these discussions, the better, and I hope the article gets read by a lot of Slashdotters for that reason.