I'll be more enthusiastic when Palm gets its act together and uses all that newly found horsepower to make Grafitti far more accurate and less of a pain in the butt to use.
The GPL is a programmer's idea of freedom, not an end-user's.
GUI-driven desktop software aimed at end-users is about Freedom: the freedom to get stuff done with a minimum of fuss. "Free Software" advocates have repeatedly shown that they do not value this freedom in any kind of way. Anyone who petitions
Free Software developers to give end-users the freedom they need (including usability professionals with years of experience in making interfaces easy to use) are met with the utmost hostility and are told "Free Software does not entitle you to a usable interface".
If Free Software people choose to conduct themselves in this manner and do nothing but oppress end-users on Free Software platforms like GNU/Linux, that is their perogative. But when one considers that these very same people who are oppressing end users and denying them the freedom to get things done with their computers are the very same people who are who are clamoring for this very same software to be used in schools and governments to replace proprietary platforms that give end-users the freedom to get work done easily, this situation becomes inexcusable.
I agree with the part about people adapting to the computer UI, but in the case of Palm, Graffiti was the proper UI decision to make for that era.
In UI design, just as in engineering, we have trade-offs. You let something give in one area to get something in return. Palm's design had to use grafitti because it was the only way to create a device that was capable of fitting easily in your shirt pocket and running on batteries for entire month(s) (a Palm back then with a 200mhz CPU like the one in my zaurus would have been like carrying around a brick). People seem to forget that how people interact with hardware UI is just as much part of the user experience as how they act with the software UI. This is doubly true for a device that is carried around as opposed to one that sits on your desk all day. In fact, the creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, did something that few PDA creators actually do: he shaped a block of wood (i.e. made a prototype) that would easily fit into the pocket and from there built up the model of user interaction with the hardware by carrying the thing around to meetings and writing on it (that's how he came up with grafitti). Any good UI design person will tell you that you should design the interface before you start designing the technical stuff (as opposed to grafting it on last as 'a testament to modularity'). I really wish that designers of mobile devices took half as much care designing their products as Jeff Hawkins did with the original Palm.
While the Newton was a great idea, it was somthing that didn't easily fit into the pocket. I had heard rumors that mac journalist Andy Ihnatko actually created a "holster" so that he was able to carry the Newton around with him whereever he went; if that isn't a great example of a human being forced to adapt to clunky technology, I don't know what is.
But your are completely right to criticize grafitti in this day and age. Palm processors have gotten faster and memory has gotten larger, yet none of these resources have been used to make Palms handwriting recognition any more accurate or Grafitti any more humane. For crying out loud, the next generation of mobile devices will have 400mhz StrongARM processors; before we use this all this power to do multi-media this and wireless connectivity that, we should make sure that people have the ability to easily write stuff into their PDA's.
Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards
on
Ark Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
for they are subtle and easily screwed up.
Just because you break something down into stages doesn't mean that any of those stages won't have serious usability design flaws.
For example, the Red Hat installer has a wizard, but they still do this confusing, ambiguous, and non-standard hierarchical radio button thingy in one section. Mandrake installer has a wizard, but they still denote progress through the wizard by whether a button that denotes each stage is green or red (which kind of sucks for people with red/green color blindness).
I'm not saying wizards, when properly implemented, are a bad idea, but they are by no means a panacea for the stuff that really confuses end users. While many linux distros now have graphical stuff, the graphical stuff is still designed by programmers without any design sense at all. And this is really why so many people still find linux so hard to use.
Mac OS X is not unix on the desktop.
on
Ark Linux
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· Score: 2
To have a successful Unix OS for the masses, you need a developer community that places serious value on providing the end-user with a quality user experience.
Mac OSX has succeeded where linux has failed because it really has an entirely different developer culture than linux (or really, most of the unix developer community, for that matter).
Linux has an uphill battle because for so long its developer community has called end users stupid and has refused to believe that its interfaces have serious usability problems.
The point of my subject is that the mac developer community is really so radically different from the traditionalist unix developers in their belief system that you can't call Mac OSX a unix desktop; it's really "a desktop that just happens to use unix". Which is a good thing.
Humans will develop much larger asses so as to no longer need to purchase couches.
Donkeys on you can veg out on. Cool. But where would you stick the remote?
And wheels. Evolution will finally come up with wheels.
Miguel Icaza's head in a jar finally adds the ultimate feature that Outlook Express doesn't have. Of course, by that time, Microsoft will have added wheels *and* brakes to Outlook Express. The battle for more featureful mail clients will never end.
As for animals, they will be genetically developed to grow human faces and replacement butts.
I never thought of Matt Stone and Trey Parker as futurists, but a 4-assed monkey is starting to seem a little less ridiculous.
We're already growing human ears on rats, so you just know we're going to be growing full blown cosmetic replacements for every starlet in Hollywood.
But audiences of the future might pay far more to see starlets growing rat ears.
For all the expense of the beach front mansion, it's clean and well designed and it makes you appreciate living. You pay a lot, but money that goes towards a livable environment where you children are well-educated is money well spent.
Then, there's the Windows suburbs. The people who design the houses there never think that people actually live in them. Yes, they're cheaper, but if you had to crawl through a three foot-high door every day and walk through hallways that are slanted 45 degrees and climb up ladders instead of stairs, you'd eventually go nuts. The only reason that people live in these houses is becase they're cheaper and because corporations tend to buy these messed-up dwellings for their employees.
You could go the Wal-Mart route, but that actually located in the worst slum in the city, Linux Alley. The houses (really shanteys) cost nothing, but the roofs are so full of holes it's almost like you're living under a sieve. If you complain that there is no heat or running water, the slumlord (linux developers) who charges nothing for the shantys will beat the crap out of you and then tell you that you should quit whining about what you are getting for free. Social services (UI designers) have repeatedly tried to come in and clean up the shantytowns, but they get chased away by the slumlord, who doesn't really consider the field of social worker to be a valid profession. Many of the occupants of Linux Alley are sub-human creatures (long time linux users) that pride themselves on living in substandard conditions. They don't mind dirt floors (badly designed interfaces) and the fact that they naturally grow fur with a coatings of waterproof oil (have lot of technical experience) means that they can bear a lot of cold nights and leaky roofs (confusing and ambiguous interfaces). These creatures claim that the slum lord is making stuff better and they point to the new pretty coats of paint that are on the cardboard wall. But the slumlord has never really had any experience making quality homes, so the most he really knows how to do is make pretty the top layer that's above all the other nasty layers of crud. When he's done painting, the shack is really not more livable then it was before.
The mac user would save a lot of money here, certainly, but that would be living like an animal, not a human being.
Why do the mac users put up with the crap of Apple mansions? Every other place in town treats them far, far worse.
Probably the best thing the people living in Apple mansions could do would be to bulldoze a good section of Linux Alley, chase out the slumlord, move the displaced sub-human creatures to wildlife preserves (server closets) where they can be with their own kind, and then build smaller, cheaper versions of linux mansions there.
In other words, make a linux distribution that encompasses mac ideals.
It's kind of weird to see a flamebait parent post morph into an interesting tech discusssion. I'll probably get modded off-topic, but what the hell.
I'm actually writing a blog system that stores blog files in xml and then transforms them from xml to html (among other formats). I've considered the whole just-in-time transformation thing, but I'm worried that it might be too much of a speed hit (every time a user hits the blog site, yet another transform). If it saps too much server cpu cycles, sysadmins might not be all to keen on having the software installed.
Do you think my fears are unfounded, and that 1000 users hitting the site a day (which means maybe ~1500 jit xslt transformations) on a server that a hell of a lot of people are using for a hell of a lot of other things is reasonable?
But if open source software people hurt apple by not supporting ports to the mac, and apple goes out of business, where are open source people going to steal all their ideas for themes from?
Mr Moen, when his character is attacked in a public forum, has a right to defend himself. If I'm ever covered in Slashdot, I'll do the same.
Mr. Moen has the right to any opinion he wants and he should be able to express it.
That being said, I feel that Kernigheze such as Mr. Moen have effectively done more to crush linux on the desktop than Bill Gates ever could. Such callous attitudes towards end users and the "linux does not entitle you to a usable interface, so shut up and quit whining" mantra only further strengthen Microsofts hold on desktop computing and chase away people who want to make linux more usable.
The reason why a linux terminal often seems more efficient (and usable) than a linux gui is that the people designing linux GUI's do not know how to make efficient and usable GUI's. If you don't develop a gui that tries to minimize number of mouse clicks, adhere to Fitts' Law, be non-modal, things like that, then you'll tend to have very inefficient and unusable GUI's that make you wish to be rescued by some archaic, cryptic, monochromatic piece of keyboard driven junk from 1970.
Many open source people tend to think that the kind of stuff that I linked to above is pretty much BS, and this is where the problem with linux usability really lies.
It is often worse for an interface to look the same and act different than it is for the interface to look different *and* act different. If the environment looks the same, the user will be coming with a whole set of expectations about how the environment will act in a given situation, and will get utterly frustrated when those expectations aren't met.In some cases, the user might actually lose valuable work because the thing that looks the same on the emulating environment does something destructive that is benign on emulated environment. At least when something looks totally alien you know it will act totally alien.
While some people praise RedHat for making GNOME and KDE consistent, they didn't do this at all. GNOME and KDE might now look the same under BlueCurve, but they still act completely differently. Some poor user will do some work in a GNOME app, and then when the go to do work in a KDE app, stuff will act completely differently. The same looking button in the two environments will act differently.
A specific example: In a KDE Save File dialog, Ok is on the left and cancel is on the right. In GNOME, it's reversed. Imagine the shock the end user has when they go to save a file in a KDE app and they find that the button on the right that they clicked in the previous app (which looked exactly the same) to save their file actually prevents them from saving their file in the app they're currently using. Or even worse, they don't notice the difference and they lose the changes their made to their data.
I actually talked to the guy who created BlueCurve when RedHat did a road tour at my school. And while he acknowledged the differences, I was disappointed that he didn't understand how much trouble this could cause.
The same thing goes for the "Let's just copy Windows UI so it will be familiar for those transitioning to linux" people. No matter how hard the linux developers try, things will be different from Windows. It won't be like windows no matter what they do. I could think of no better way to turn people off of using linux than to tell them it's just like windows and for them to believe that and for them to then lose a month's worth of financial records due to some small inconsistency between windows and the windows-clone linux distro they're using.
A better solution is to not worry about familiarity and just make sure that things are well designed in general, and that nothing is ambiguous or confusing and that the users data is protected at all costs.
It is often worse for an interface to look the same and act different than it is for the interface to look different *and* act different. If the environment looks the same, the user will be coming with a whole set of expectations about how the environment will act in a given situation, and will get utterly frustrated when those expectations aren't met.In some cases, the user might actually lose valuable work because the thing that looks the same on the emulating environment does something destructive that is benign on emulated environment. At least when something looks totally alien you know it will act totally alien.
While some people praise RedHat for making GNOME and KDE consistent, they didn't do this at all. GNOME and KDE might now look the same under BlueCurve, but they still act completely differently. Some poor user will do some work in a GNOME app, and then when the go to do work in a KDE app, stuff will act completely differently. The same looking button in the two environments will act differently.
A specific example: In a KDE Save File dialog, Ok is on the left and cancel is on the right. In GNOME, it's reversed. Imagine the shock the end user has when they go to save a file in a KDE app and they find that the button on the right that they clicked in the previous app (which looked exactly the same) to save their file actually prevents them from saving their file in the app they're currently using. Or even worse, they don't notice the difference and they lose the changes their made to their data.
I actually talked to the guy who created BlueCurve when RedHat did a road tour at my school. And while he acknowledged the differences, I was disappointed that he didn't understand how much trouble this could cause.
The same thing goes for the "Let's just copy Windows UI so it will be familiar for those transitioning to linux" people. No matter how hard the linux developers try, things will be different from Windows. It won't be like windows no matter what they do. I could think of no better way to turn people off of using linux than to tell them it's just like windows and for them to believe that and for them to then lose a month's worth of financial records due to some small inconsistency between windows and the windows-clone linux distro they're using.
A better solution is to not worry about familiarity and just make sure that things are well designed in general, and that nothing is ambiguous or confusing and that the users data is protected at all costs.
They've dumped tons of money and hours into useability, and they have alot to show for it.
Yet they get yelled at by some of the best usability folks on the planet for stupid stuff like multi-row tabs and window-in-window MDI, and it literally takes them years to remove these awful designs from Windows.
Microsoft has no monopoly on usability (no pun intended). They're actually quite stupid in that field. But they look good when compared to linux because many linux developers have done things even more stupid, confusing, and ambiguous than Microsoft has.
I disagree with the assumptions made about Microsoft, but the conclusion about the Windows user experience being less bad than linux is correct.
The Zaurus explains linux's shortcomings
on
Linux in the Workplace
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The Zaurus is actually a perfect example of why linux has been having such terrible trouble getting to the desktop.
I've got a Zaurus. I like the fact that I can write custom mobile GUI applications in Python. I'm not saying it doesn't have it's uses for extremely niche applications. I've found the thing useful, so I'm not completely biased.
But unfortunately, the Zaurus UI is VERY badly designed. It's not just lack of "polish", it's stuff that any decent UI person would tell you you *never* do, especially on a mobile device with a ridiculously tiny screen.
Why is the Zaurus so very unusable?
Linux's success, which is success on the server, has come about because linux developers/users had cultural beliefs and abilities that lent themselves well to the creation of things like Apache and the Linux Kernel. Unfortunately, they had cultural beliefs (HCI is BS, RTFM, text better than graphical) that were detrimental to the making of usable software. You have to have a developer culture that values ease-of-use in order to make usable software. They were also lacking in many of the necessary skills (thinking graphically instead of textually, user-interaction design etc.) needed to do this, as well.
Let's look at the Palm as a case study. The Palm user interaction was designed before the code for the OS was ever written and before the first injection mold tool was cast. The creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, could often be seen walking around the company with a wooden mockup of the device, taking it with him to meetings and taking down imaginary notes with the stylus he had created (whittled down from a chopstick!). He thought long and hard about how to minimize the number of taps to do things (which the TrollTech has not). In short, he did what was needed to be done to have a successful, usable product.
If Jeff Hawkins was a linux developer, he would have said "I'll just tack on the GUI once I've finished all the technical stuff. Modularity and all". If someone with any UI design experience would try to save the day and tell him he needed to design the UI before anything else, he'd tell them they were being ridiculous. If someone complained that things were too hard to do, he would tell them to stop whining about what they're getting for free. He would then release the stuff he created to many of the geeky linux folks as early adopters, believing that usage would start with them and proceed to trickle down to normal folks. All the while refusing to understand that linux geeks tend to have very high tolerances for badly designed and inefficient user interfaces and will yell "Stop spreading Microsoft FUD about linux being hard to use!" at the first person who points out an ususable Open Source UI.Assuming that the Alternate Linux Universe Jeff Hawkins was receptive to user feedback regarding the bad design, he wouldn't be getting any because the majority of users would be telling him that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.The poster in an earlier thread who in jest pointed out that the guy who said KDE was easy enough for anyone to use was actually running it on Gentoo couldn't have been more right.
Palm was successful because they did things the right way, not because they were familiar to windows users. WinCE did things the wrong way because it was familiar to windows users (some Palm executives once said that competing with PocketPC "was like shooting fish in a barrel").
Linux getting to the desktop will require both the linux developer community and current user community to put down their Neale Stephenson essays and change their attitudes and the way they do things. Until this happens, the greatest roadblock to Linux on the desktop will be the linux community itself.
Bowie, this is totally unrelated the article, but I applaud your recent efforts to try to bring fresh ideas to the GNOME lists (which have been largely devoid of such things in the last several years).
Really, in the sad day and age, people with usability backgrounds who want to improve user interfaces have to arm themselves with knowledge of how to code. It sucks that the time spent learning algorithms or API's could be better spent doing user testing or reading the latest issue of interactions.But that's how things are.
Perhaps it's time that the people who give a damn about the next generation form their own damn lists where such idiots like the ones on the GNOME list don't have any say.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay.
I'll be more enthusiastic when Palm gets its act together and uses all that newly found horsepower to make Grafitti far more accurate and less of a pain in the butt to use.
If the AI is winning, we look like a bunch of stupid apes.
If the AI is losing, it cheats and starts a nuclear exchange that destroys civilization.
We're screwed either way.
The GPL is a programmer's idea of freedom, not an end-user's.
GUI-driven desktop software aimed at end-users is about Freedom: the freedom to get stuff done with a minimum of fuss. "Free Software" advocates have repeatedly shown that they do not value this freedom in any kind of way. Anyone who petitions Free Software developers to give end-users the freedom they need (including usability professionals with years of experience in making interfaces easy to use) are met with the utmost hostility and are told "Free Software does not entitle you to a usable interface".
If Free Software people choose to conduct themselves in this manner and do nothing but oppress end-users on Free Software platforms like GNU/Linux, that is their perogative. But when one considers that these very same people who are oppressing end users and denying them the freedom to get things done with their computers are the very same people who are who are clamoring for this very same software to be used in schools and governments to replace proprietary platforms that give end-users the freedom to get work done easily, this situation becomes inexcusable.
What's the craziest thing a person has ever done to get schwag?
The article would have been far more interesting if it was titled "linux hacker flies balloon and joins mile high club."
I agree with the part about people adapting to the computer UI, but in the case of Palm, Graffiti was the proper UI decision to make for that era.
In UI design, just as in engineering, we have trade-offs. You let something give in one area to get something in return. Palm's design had to use grafitti because it was the only way to create a device that was capable of fitting easily in your shirt pocket and running on batteries for entire month(s) (a Palm back then with a 200mhz CPU like the one in my zaurus would have been like carrying around a brick). People seem to forget that how people interact with hardware UI is just as much part of the user experience as how they act with the software UI. This is doubly true for a device that is carried around as opposed to one that sits on your desk all day. In fact, the creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, did something that few PDA creators actually do: he shaped a block of wood (i.e. made a prototype) that would easily fit into the pocket and from there built up the model of user interaction with the hardware by carrying the thing around to meetings and writing on it (that's how he came up with grafitti). Any good UI design person will tell you that you should design the interface before you start designing the technical stuff (as opposed to grafting it on last as 'a testament to modularity'). I really wish that designers of mobile devices took half as much care designing their products as Jeff Hawkins did with the original Palm.
While the Newton was a great idea, it was somthing that didn't easily fit into the pocket. I had heard rumors that mac journalist Andy Ihnatko actually created a "holster" so that he was able to carry the Newton around with him whereever he went; if that isn't a great example of a human being forced to adapt to clunky technology, I don't know what is.
But your are completely right to criticize grafitti in this day and age. Palm processors have gotten faster and memory has gotten larger, yet none of these resources have been used to make Palms handwriting recognition any more accurate or Grafitti any more humane. For crying out loud, the next generation of mobile devices will have 400mhz StrongARM processors; before we use this all this power to do multi-media this and wireless connectivity that, we should make sure that people have the ability to easily write stuff into their PDA's.
for they are subtle and easily screwed up.
Just because you break something down into stages doesn't mean that any of those stages won't have serious usability design flaws.
For example, the Red Hat installer has a wizard, but they still do this confusing, ambiguous, and non-standard hierarchical radio button thingy in one section. Mandrake installer has a wizard, but they still denote progress through the wizard by whether a button that denotes each stage is green or red (which kind of sucks for people with red/green color blindness).
I'm not saying wizards, when properly implemented, are a bad idea, but they are by no means a panacea for the stuff that really confuses end users. While many linux distros now have graphical stuff, the graphical stuff is still designed by programmers without any design sense at all. And this is really why so many people still find linux so hard to use.
To have a successful Unix OS for the masses, you need a developer community that places serious value on providing the end-user with a quality user experience.
Mac OSX has succeeded where linux has failed because it really has an entirely different developer culture than linux (or really, most of the unix developer community, for that matter).
Linux has an uphill battle because for so long its developer community has called end users stupid and has refused to believe that its interfaces have serious usability problems.
The point of my subject is that the mac developer community is really so radically different from the traditionalist unix developers in their belief system that you can't call Mac OSX a unix desktop; it's really "a desktop that just happens to use unix". Which is a good thing.
If it can only run operating systems that can be trusted, how the hell am I going to be able to get it work with Windows?
Technically it's a star topology.
Humans will develop much larger asses so as to no longer need to purchase couches.
Donkeys on you can veg out on. Cool. But where would you stick the remote?
And wheels. Evolution will finally come up with wheels.
Miguel Icaza's head in a jar finally adds the ultimate feature that Outlook Express doesn't have. Of course, by that time, Microsoft will have added wheels *and* brakes to Outlook Express. The battle for more featureful mail clients will never end.
As for animals, they will be genetically developed to grow human faces and replacement butts.
I never thought of Matt Stone and Trey Parker as futurists, but a 4-assed monkey is starting to seem a little less ridiculous.
We're already growing human ears on rats, so you just know we're going to be growing full blown cosmetic replacements for every starlet in Hollywood.
But audiences of the future might pay far more to see starlets growing rat ears.
For all the expense of the beach front mansion, it's clean and well designed and it makes you appreciate living. You pay a lot, but money that goes towards a livable environment where you children are well-educated is money well spent.
Then, there's the Windows suburbs. The people who design the houses there never think that people actually live in them. Yes, they're cheaper, but if you had to crawl through a three foot-high door every day and walk through hallways that are slanted 45 degrees and climb up ladders instead of stairs, you'd eventually go nuts. The only reason that people live in these houses is becase they're cheaper and because corporations tend to buy these messed-up dwellings for their employees.
You could go the Wal-Mart route, but that actually located in the worst slum in the city, Linux Alley. The houses (really shanteys) cost nothing, but the roofs are so full of holes it's almost like you're living under a sieve. If you complain that there is no heat or running water, the slumlord (linux developers) who charges nothing for the shantys will beat the crap out of you and then tell you that you should quit whining about what you are getting for free. Social services (UI designers) have repeatedly tried to come in and clean up the shantytowns, but they get chased away by the slumlord, who doesn't really consider the field of social worker to be a valid profession. Many of the occupants of Linux Alley are sub-human creatures (long time linux users) that pride themselves on living in substandard conditions. They don't mind dirt floors (badly designed interfaces) and the fact that they naturally grow fur with a coatings of waterproof oil (have lot of technical experience) means that they can bear a lot of cold nights and leaky roofs (confusing and ambiguous interfaces). These creatures claim that the slum lord is making stuff better and they point to the new pretty coats of paint that are on the cardboard wall. But the slumlord has never really had any experience making quality homes, so the most he really knows how to do is make pretty the top layer that's above all the other nasty layers of crud. When he's done painting, the shack is really not more livable then it was before.
The mac user would save a lot of money here, certainly, but that would be living like an animal, not a human being.
Why do the mac users put up with the crap of Apple mansions? Every other place in town treats them far, far worse.
Probably the best thing the people living in Apple mansions could do would be to bulldoze a good section of Linux Alley, chase out the slumlord, move the displaced sub-human creatures to wildlife preserves (server closets) where they can be with their own kind, and then build smaller, cheaper versions of linux mansions there.
In other words, make a linux distribution that encompasses mac ideals.
It's kind of weird to see a flamebait parent post morph into an interesting tech discusssion. I'll probably get modded off-topic, but what the hell.
I'm actually writing a blog system that stores blog files in xml and then transforms them from xml to html (among other formats). I've considered the whole just-in-time transformation thing, but I'm worried that it might be too much of a speed hit (every time a user hits the blog site, yet another transform). If it saps too much server cpu cycles, sysadmins might not be all to keen on having the software installed.
Do you think my fears are unfounded, and that 1000 users hitting the site a day (which means maybe ~1500 jit xslt transformations) on a server that a hell of a lot of people are using for a hell of a lot of other things is reasonable?
But if open source software people hurt apple by not supporting ports to the mac, and apple goes out of business, where are open source people going to steal all their ideas for themes from?
Not only Apple doesn't want a non-consistant user experience, but most mac users don't want a non-consistant user experience, either.
In fact, most sane people on any platform want a consistant user experience.
Mr Moen, when his character is attacked in a public forum, has a right to defend himself. If I'm ever covered in Slashdot, I'll do the same.
Mr. Moen has the right to any opinion he wants and he should be able to express it.
That being said, I feel that Kernigheze such as Mr. Moen have effectively done more to crush linux on the desktop than Bill Gates ever could. Such callous attitudes towards end users and the "linux does not entitle you to a usable interface, so shut up and quit whining" mantra only further strengthen Microsofts hold on desktop computing and chase away people who want to make linux more usable.
The reason why a linux terminal often seems more efficient (and usable) than a linux gui is that the people designing linux GUI's do not know how to make efficient and usable GUI's. If you don't develop a gui that tries to minimize number of mouse clicks, adhere to Fitts' Law, be non-modal, things like that, then you'll tend to have very inefficient and unusable GUI's that make you wish to be rescued by some archaic, cryptic, monochromatic piece of keyboard driven junk from 1970.
Many open source people tend to think that the kind of stuff that I linked to above is pretty much BS, and this is where the problem with linux usability really lies.
It is often worse for an interface to look the same and act different than it is for the interface to look different *and* act different.
If the environment looks the same, the user will be coming with a whole set of expectations about how the environment will act in a given situation, and will get utterly frustrated when those expectations aren't met.In some cases, the user might actually lose valuable work because the thing that looks the same on the emulating environment does something destructive that is benign on emulated environment. At least when something looks totally alien you know it will act totally alien.
While some people praise RedHat for making GNOME and KDE consistent, they didn't do this at all. GNOME and KDE might now look the same under BlueCurve, but they still act completely differently. Some poor user will do some work in a GNOME app, and then when the go to do work in a KDE app, stuff will act completely differently. The same looking button in the two environments will act differently.
A specific example: In a KDE Save File dialog, Ok is on the left and cancel is on the right. In GNOME, it's reversed. Imagine the shock the end user has when they go to save a file in a KDE app and they find that the button on the right that they clicked in the previous app (which looked exactly the same) to save their file actually prevents them from saving their file in the app they're currently using. Or even worse, they don't notice the difference and they lose the changes their made to their data.
I actually talked to the guy who created BlueCurve when RedHat did a road tour at my school. And while he acknowledged the differences, I was disappointed that he didn't understand how much trouble this could cause.
The same thing goes for the "Let's just copy Windows UI so it will be familiar for those transitioning to linux" people. No matter how hard the linux developers try, things will be different from Windows. It won't be like windows no matter what they do. I could think of no better way to turn people off of using linux than to tell them it's just like windows and for them to believe that and for them to then lose a month's worth of financial records due to some small inconsistency between windows and the windows-clone linux distro they're using.
A better solution is to not worry about familiarity and just make sure that things are well designed in general, and that nothing is ambiguous or confusing and that the users data is protected at all costs.
It is often worse for an interface to look the same and act different than it is for the interface to look different *and* act different.
If the environment looks the same, the user will be coming with a whole set of expectations about how the environment will act in a given situation, and will get utterly frustrated when those expectations aren't met.In some cases, the user might actually lose valuable work because the thing that looks the same on the emulating environment does something destructive that is benign on emulated environment. At least when something looks totally alien you know it will act totally alien.
While some people praise RedHat for making GNOME and KDE consistent, they didn't do this at all. GNOME and KDE might now look the same under BlueCurve, but they still act completely differently. Some poor user will do some work in a GNOME app, and then when the go to do work in a KDE app, stuff will act completely differently. The same looking button in the two environments will act differently.
A specific example: In a KDE Save File dialog, Ok is on the left and cancel is on the right. In GNOME, it's reversed. Imagine the shock the end user has when they go to save a file in a KDE app and they find that the button on the right that they clicked in the previous app (which looked exactly the same) to save their file actually prevents them from saving their file in the app they're currently using. Or even worse, they don't notice the difference and they lose the changes their made to their data.
I actually talked to the guy who created BlueCurve when RedHat did a road tour at my school. And while he acknowledged the differences, I was disappointed that he didn't understand how much trouble this could cause.
The same thing goes for the "Let's just copy Windows UI so it will be familiar for those transitioning to linux" people. No matter how hard the linux developers try, things will be different from Windows. It won't be like windows no matter what they do. I could think of no better way to turn people off of using linux than to tell them it's just like windows and for them to believe that and for them to then lose a month's worth of financial records due to some small inconsistency between windows and the windows-clone linux distro they're using.
A better solution is to not worry about familiarity and just make sure that things are well designed in general, and that nothing is ambiguous or confusing and that the users data is protected at all costs.
They've dumped tons of money and hours into useability, and they have alot to show for it.
Yet they get yelled at by some of the best usability folks on the planet for stupid stuff like multi-row tabs and window-in-window MDI, and it literally takes them years to remove these awful designs from Windows.
Microsoft has no monopoly on usability (no pun intended). They're actually quite stupid in that field. But they look good when compared to linux because many linux developers have done things even more stupid, confusing, and ambiguous than Microsoft has.
I disagree with the assumptions made about Microsoft, but the conclusion about the Windows user experience being less bad than linux is correct.
The Zaurus is actually a perfect example of why linux has been having such terrible trouble getting to the desktop.
I've got a Zaurus. I like the fact that I can write custom mobile GUI applications in Python. I'm not saying it doesn't have it's uses for extremely niche applications. I've found the thing useful, so I'm not completely biased.
But unfortunately, the Zaurus UI is VERY badly designed. It's not just lack of "polish", it's stuff that any decent UI person would tell you you *never* do, especially on a mobile device with a ridiculously tiny screen.
Why is the Zaurus so very unusable?
Linux's success, which is success on the server, has come about because linux developers/users had cultural beliefs and abilities that lent themselves well to the creation of things like Apache and the Linux Kernel. Unfortunately, they had cultural beliefs (HCI is BS, RTFM, text better than graphical) that were detrimental to the making of usable software. You have to have a developer culture that values ease-of-use in order to make usable software. They were also lacking in many of the necessary skills (thinking graphically instead of textually, user-interaction design etc.) needed to do this, as well.
Let's look at the Palm as a case study. The Palm user interaction was designed before the code for the OS was ever written and before the first injection mold tool was cast. The creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, could often be seen walking around the company with a wooden mockup of the device, taking it with him to meetings and taking down imaginary notes with the stylus he had created (whittled down from a chopstick!). He thought long and hard about how to minimize the number of taps to do things (which the TrollTech has not). In short, he did what was needed to be done to have a successful, usable product.
If Jeff Hawkins was a linux developer, he would have said "I'll just tack on the GUI once I've finished all the technical stuff. Modularity and all". If someone with any UI design experience would try to save the day and tell him he needed to design the UI before anything else, he'd tell them they were being ridiculous. If someone complained that things were too hard to do, he would tell them to stop whining about what they're getting for free. He would then release the stuff he created to many of the geeky linux folks as early adopters, believing that usage would start with them and proceed to trickle down to normal folks. All the while refusing to understand that linux geeks tend to have very high tolerances for badly designed and inefficient user interfaces and will yell "Stop spreading Microsoft FUD about linux being hard to use!" at the first person who points out an ususable Open Source UI.Assuming that the Alternate Linux Universe Jeff Hawkins was receptive to user feedback regarding the bad design, he wouldn't be getting any because the majority of users would be telling him that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.The poster in an earlier thread who in jest pointed out that the guy who said KDE was easy enough for anyone to use was actually running it on Gentoo couldn't have been more right.
Palm was successful because they did things the right way, not because they were familiar to windows users. WinCE did things the wrong way because it was familiar to windows users (some Palm executives once said that competing with PocketPC "was like shooting fish in a barrel").
Linux getting to the desktop will require both the linux developer community and current user community to put down their Neale Stephenson essays and change their attitudes and the way they do things. Until this happens, the greatest roadblock to Linux on the desktop will be the linux community itself.
taco dishes out scoop of freshmeat and apple
Anyone else getting hungry?
Bowie, this is totally unrelated the article, but I applaud your recent efforts to try to bring fresh ideas to the GNOME lists (which have been largely devoid of such things in the last several years).
Really, in the sad day and age, people with usability backgrounds who want to improve user interfaces have to arm themselves with knowledge of how to code. It sucks that the time spent learning algorithms or API's could be better spent doing user testing or reading the latest issue of interactions.But that's how things are.
Perhaps it's time that the people who give a damn about the next generation form their own damn lists where such idiots like the ones on the GNOME list don't have any say.
>but bikini girls on a 1.2 inch screen???
The technology is more compelling once you add the hands-free headset.
And suddenly the large stockpiles of Old Spice found in Afghan caves seemed a little less ridiculous.