Linux/UNIX Usability Research

st. augustine writes "A group of researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information has started a project called the Linux/UNIX Independent Group for Usability Information. Their goal: "to couple the power of UNIX with user interfaces that are consciously designed to allow novices to become experts without removing any of the existing functionality." They look serious. " Check out the Salon article that ran earlier today-they're mentioned in there as well. I've actually talked with those folks as well-they're smart cookies.

Comments

Linux usability

[raph]

A couple of comments here. I'm a Gnome developer, and in the Gnome community, there is a serious focus on making Linux truly usable. We talk of the "mom test," i.e. your mom being able to get useful work done with the software.

Real software usability goes deeper than just interactions with GUI dialogs and so on. For experts, Linux is much more usable than the consumer OS's because it is much more stable, more transparent (less things are hidden under the candy shell of the GUI), and has a broader collection of powerful tools. The challenge is going to be preserving this kind of usability while also making Linux more accessible to non-expert users.

One argument that's often made is that Linux suits the needs of expert users because it was designed by expert users. Since we are people who don't mind learning how things really work, and prefer the tools to be powerful once we do learn them, that's reflected in what we build. The argument usually goes on to say that since we don't want pretty but shallow, easy to learn but limited tools, we will never end up building these things for Linux novices.

This argument misses one important point, in my opinion. Even if you accept that the intellectual challenge of building usable software isn't by itself enough to keep the effort going, this argument pretty much assumes that the world is split up into hacker types and lots of isolated people who don't understand their computers. But this is not the full story. Many, many Linux people are sysadmins for a large number of not-so-computer-savvy users. Let me tell you something, Linux people in Windows sysadmin jobs hate having to do several fresh reinstalls of Windows per day per few hundred machines just because the registry gets wedged and there's no way to figure out how to fix it. Many of them would like nothing better than to have Linux become a viable desktop system so they'd be able to at least work with systems they don't hate.

It may well be that these hardy souls turn out to be the vast army that works to make free software usable. Once Linux starts going into the desktop in sysadminned environments, the channels are in place to collect user feedback, and also to do something about it. If such-and-such feature is confusing to users, then the admins will hear about it. It's probably easier in many cases to just fix it than keep dealing with the problem reports, and certainly a hell of a lot more fun.

Don't underestimate the dramatic strides already made in usability by the Linux community. When I first started working with Linux about six years ago, the usual way to install new software was to check the README, edit the Makefile, more often than not fix a few #includes or function prototypes, then run a series of make commands. These days we have RPM packages and so on, but we also have ./configure; make. To me, the autoconf system is a classic example of "deep usability" as opposed to the surface kind.

In summary, I think we're just going to keep on going until we get there.