Regarding the button order, it was originally "Cancel" and "Ok" when the mac first came out. This fits with the notion of western culture that going to left is "going back" or "stopping" and going to the right is "moving ahead". Brake pedal is on the left, gas on the right; turn a screw to the right to go ahead and put it in, turn to the left to go back and take it out; when you go back in time, the watch hand goes to the left, when time progresses, you go to the right.
Unfortunately, when microsoft released windows, they switched around the button order on purpose to avoid lawsuits from apple (fat lot of good that did them). Their interface change effectively violated the very way that most people (who speak english) have thought about how stuff works for thousands of years.
The KDE people, being clueless command-line nerds (they still can't understand why the need to use the word "folder" instead of "directory" in their file dialog) who thought they could do GUI stuff, blindly and stupidly copied microsoft. GNOME people, being KDE wannabes who didn't appreciate the Trolltech license, blindly and stupidly copied KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap. (And the ignorant Free Software Person will say "But they're microsoft. They have billions of dollars which they must be spending on usability research and they wouldn't have 95% of the market share if they made unusable stuff. They must know what they're doing." And I respond "But they're microsoft. They have billions of dollars which they must be spending on security research and they wouldn't have 95% of the market share if they made insecure stuff. They must know what they're doing.")
The one and only one thing I applaud the GNOME folks for is moving the button order back to the way it originally was and stealing back the interface from a long legacy of techies who told usability experts to fuck off and die and then tried to pawn off their unusable crap as "perfectly ready for the desktop".
If we could only alienate those people just a little more, perhaps they'd go back to their little server closets where they won't do any more damage and they're actually good at what they do. Successful desktop linux is as much about removing people as it is adding them.
That doctrine is called Pekuach Nefesh, which states that barring idolatry, adultery, or murder, actions that are otherwise prohibited by jewish religious law are permitted when they are necessary for saving a life.
I'm pretty sure that islam also allows for extenuating circumstances in dietary law when life is at stake.
In "Junkyard Wars", after the contest ends with one team victorious and the other defeated, what happens to the stuff people built? Do the contestants take it home, does it go back to the scrapyard, or do you end up driving it to work the next day?
I understand the importance of having the source code for something so I can modify it to meet my needs.
However, as long as the open source community doesn't "get" the concept of user interface usability, they really can't be trusted with something like the source code for Apple's GUI layer. If they were allowed to have the code, they would turn Apple's UI into some completely unusable piece of trash that deprives end-users of a valuable freedom: the freedom to get work done with a minimum of fuss. In other words, they would turn Apple's GUI layer into something resembling the mess that is GNOME and KDE.
It's really a lot like Star Trek's Prime Directive. Until a civilization has reached a state of evolution where they are intelligent and moral enough to not misuse and abuse a piece of advanced technology, it is critical to keep that piece of technology out of their hands. When the open source community has evolved to the point where they no longer have religious problems with spaces in filenames, when they can understand why "System Preferences" is preferable to "etc", when they can use the word "folder" instead of "directory", when they stop expressing derision and hostility towards usability professionals, and when they leave their command-line anti-newbie rtfm baggage out of the GUI design, then and only then should they be given the source code to Apples GUI layer.
Articles I've read on business management repeatedly cite the fact that the Chinese word for "crisis" also means "opportunity". I wonder if the Chinese word for "computer virus" also means "really cool pirated software with unexpected features".
You are so correct: what you name something has a profound effect on usability.
One of the stupidest things I've ever seen in GNOME is what they named the documentation program. They named it ScrollKeeper, since in a way, documentation could be thought of as scrolls, an ancient type of media whose main users today are Dungeons and Dragons players and rabbis. A cutesy little name with geek connotations.
Unfortunately, when most users hear the word "Scroll" they associate it most often with movement in a window. Guess what happens in ScrollKeeper breaks? They user sees "ScrollKeeper Error" and unless they're a GNOME programmer they think "Holy sh*t, there's something wrong with my windows" and not "Holy sh*t, there's something wrong with my documentation system".
Would the GNOME project ever change the name "ScrollKeeper" to something like "Gnome Documentation System"? Most likely not. They love their little cute names.
I couldn't agree with you more. I've been really disappointed that many of the linux and palm offerings haven't applied the ever-increasing number of cpu cycles and MB of RAM to using more complex HWR algorithms to provide more accurate and forgiving hand-writing recognition. It's kind of messed up when we now have PDA's running webservers, playing MP3's, and logging into networks using ssh but the state of HWR on many PDA's is not better than it was five years ago running on machines that were 20 times less powerful. Given the linux community's lack of attention to usability issues and incredulous attitudes towards HCI experts, I'm not terribly surpised that most linux PDA's have sucky HWR. But Palm has been saavy about interface design in the past, so they should really know better than to keep grafitti from receiving important and long overdue improvements.
Apple should launch their own satellite from the mothership. Apple has a mothership, you ask? Of course they do. Do you honestly believe the story that the $400 million that Steve Jobs spent buying out next NeXT really went towards million dollar NeXT Cubes and $50,000 toilet seats?
this article on slashdot 8 months ago mentioned that Danger devices would incorporate GPS. I look on their site, and no mention of GPS whatsoever. What gives? I'm kind of dissapointed; I thought I would finally have the problem of "where in the hell did I park my car at the mega-mall" licked.
Why Free Software UI tends to suck
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Matthew Thomas (who does a lot of UI stuff for Mozilla) has written two really good articles that largely answer your question)
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license
Because Free Software is currently Freedom As A Programmer Envisions It. As the Free Software concept was nutured by Richard M. Stallman, a programmer, this is not surprising. Freedom As An End User Envisions In (also known as The Freedom To Get Stuff Done) has never really been considered by the Free Software community to be a Valid Freedom.
Funny you should mention, I'm currently drawing up a public license that enforces usability and goes after the people who've kept linux so very unusable.
The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world.
I commonly hear this phrase "We've gotten so far on the server, it's only a matter of time before get to the desktop." Unfortunately, this statement makes the assumption that the same abilities, values, and methodologies that lead to success on the server do the same for the desktop. Linux has been doing so well on the server because people in the linux community were really good at doing server stuff. Unfortunately these people were the most absolute worst people you could have ever sent to do desktop stuff. 30 years of anti-newbie RTFM baggage, command-line junkihood, and having a userbase that entirely consists of programmers and sysadmins does not behoove the creation of high quality user interfaces. In contrast, the mac developer community has for 17 years put very strong values on consistancy and non-geeks being able to use the software. That's why they've been able to succeed on the unix desktop in 3 years where linux has failed for the last 7-8.
Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits?
It's already been tried, and has been tried by people with very strong usability/HCI backgrounds. The response they generally get from programmers is "stop whining. If you want to fix something, you should learn how to code". Or sometimes you'll hear "Don't complain about what you get for free". Or "That's what you want, that's not what I want. That's just your opinion."
Or if a usability person criticizes a UI in front of a kernel hacker, the kernel hacker might say "I can't believe that people actually get paid to criticize the work of others" (true story).
When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license
First of all, you have to be pro-active about creating good user interfaces. Users generally do not actively complain about specific application interfaces unless the interfaces are truly, truly, horrible. They will usually passively complain, trying to find execuses to use the program less, or unconsciously creating some workaround, or saying "I hate computers" around the watercooler. You won't get active feedback very often from users, so you need to actively watch them using your UI. So often what makes a UI unbearable is a bunch of little, annoying things that add up to one cumulative bad user experience. To catch those little things, you really have to watch the person using the interfaces. You should also do research ahead of time to learn (before you design the UI) to learn what the most common annoyances are. Unfortunately, most Free Software UI's are cranked out and *then* people try to do active damage control. Much like the world of commercial software, actually.
Another problem with your suggestion is that most of the current userbase for Free Software/OSS are the geeks who've been so clueless about good UI (and some of whom who think that HCI is a load of bull). These people adapt very, very well to badly designed UI's, often priding themselves on doing just that. They often don't take notice of the little, annoying things and are often not confused by ambiguous widget layouts or jargon-laden wording. When you consider these facts, it's not surpising why StarOffice gets such glowing reviews from the geek community. Assuming you manage to find a geek who gives you feedback about the UI, chances are he's not going to a suggestion that jives with all of what we've learned about HCI in the last 20 years. Just because you get feedback doesn't necessarily mean its usable feedback.
If you're kinda handy with Sendmail, and CEO stubbornly refuses to believe that SMTP From: headers can be faked, guess how surpised he'll be when he receives an email from gwbush@whitehouse.gov giving you a full pardon.
Slashdot Mirror
And suddenly the expression "It's as fun as watching paint dry" takes on a whole new meaning.
If macs get you that excited, shouldn't you call it "apple juice"?
The value of the laptop goes down by 20% the second you drive it off the Best Buy lot.
The story is about the Direct Marketers Association asking to be regulated by the government, yet the topic icon doesn't have wings.
Strange...
Regarding the button order, it was originally "Cancel" and "Ok" when the mac first came out. This fits with the notion of western culture that going to left is "going back" or "stopping" and going to the right is "moving ahead". Brake pedal is on the left, gas on the right; turn a screw to the right to go ahead and put it in, turn to the left to go back and take it out; when you go back in time, the watch hand goes to the left, when time progresses, you go to the right.
Unfortunately, when microsoft released windows, they switched around the button order on purpose to avoid lawsuits from apple (fat lot of good that did them). Their interface change effectively violated the very way that most people (who speak english) have thought about how stuff works for thousands of years.
The KDE people, being clueless command-line nerds (they still can't understand why the need to use the word "folder" instead of "directory" in their file dialog) who thought they could do GUI stuff, blindly and stupidly copied microsoft. GNOME people, being KDE wannabes who didn't appreciate the Trolltech license, blindly and stupidly copied KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap. (And the ignorant Free Software Person will say "But they're microsoft. They have billions of dollars which they must be spending on usability research and they wouldn't have 95% of the market share if they made unusable stuff. They must know what they're doing." And I respond "But they're microsoft. They have billions of dollars which they must be spending on security research and they wouldn't have 95% of the market share if they made insecure stuff. They must know what they're doing.")
The one and only one thing I applaud the GNOME folks for is moving the button order back to the way it originally was and stealing back the interface from a long legacy of techies who told usability experts to fuck off and die and then tried to pawn off their unusable crap as "perfectly ready for the desktop".
If we could only alienate those people just a little more, perhaps they'd go back to their little server closets where they won't do any more damage and they're actually good at what they do. Successful desktop linux is as much about removing people as it is adding them.
That doctrine is called Pekuach Nefesh, which states that barring idolatry, adultery, or murder, actions that are otherwise prohibited by jewish religious law are permitted when they are necessary for saving a life.
I'm pretty sure that islam also allows for extenuating circumstances in dietary law when life is at stake.
In "Junkyard Wars", after the contest ends with one team victorious and the other defeated, what happens to the stuff people built? Do the contestants take it home, does it go back to the scrapyard, or do you end up driving it to work the next day?
Like it's namesake, the Bird Of Prey doesn't have bathrooms.
>Linux is the one true un*x, the one to rule them all
...and in the darkness bind them.
The difference is that Mac zealots are all about ruling, but they draw the line at bondage in dark rooms.
I understand the importance of having the source code for something so I can modify it to meet my needs.
However, as long as the open source community doesn't "get" the concept of user interface usability, they really can't be trusted with something like the source code for Apple's GUI layer. If they were allowed to have the code, they would turn Apple's UI into some completely unusable piece of trash that deprives end-users of a valuable freedom: the freedom to get work done with a minimum of fuss. In other words, they would turn Apple's GUI layer into something resembling the mess that is GNOME and KDE.
It's really a lot like Star Trek's Prime Directive. Until a civilization has reached a state of evolution where they are intelligent and moral enough to not misuse and abuse a piece of advanced technology, it is critical to keep that piece of technology out of their hands. When the open source community has evolved to the point where they no longer have religious problems with spaces in filenames, when they can understand why "System Preferences" is preferable to "etc", when they can use the word "folder" instead of "directory", when they stop expressing derision and hostility towards usability professionals, and when they leave their command-line anti-newbie rtfm baggage out of the GUI design, then and only then should they be given the source code to Apples GUI layer.
If you buy a copy of Computer Waiting Games and give Power Strip Russian Roulette a try, journaling might be very nice thing to have.
Keep in mind that you'll have to make the tranquilizer dart 20% heavier to make Carrot-Top less annoying
Articles I've read on business management repeatedly cite the fact that the Chinese word for "crisis" also means "opportunity". I wonder if the Chinese word for "computer virus" also means "really cool pirated software with unexpected features".
For some unknown reason Timbot gives strange warnings about rabbits.
But this could be just what the underemployed Redneck, Snaggle Toothed Monster Truck programmers need in this slow economy.
You are so correct: what you name something has a profound effect on usability.
One of the stupidest things I've ever seen in GNOME is what they named the documentation program. They named it ScrollKeeper, since in a way, documentation could be thought of as scrolls, an ancient type of media whose main users today are Dungeons and Dragons players and rabbis. A cutesy little name with geek connotations.
Unfortunately, when most users hear the word "Scroll" they associate it most often with movement in a window. Guess what happens in ScrollKeeper breaks? They user sees "ScrollKeeper Error" and unless they're a GNOME programmer they think "Holy sh*t, there's something wrong with my windows" and not "Holy sh*t, there's something wrong with my documentation system".
Would the GNOME project ever change the name "ScrollKeeper" to something like "Gnome Documentation System"? Most likely not. They love their little cute names.
I've always wanted a PDA that's been dead for several thousand years and runs off of protoblood.
It's an evil plot by the Legion Of Gnome.
I couldn't agree with you more. I've been really disappointed that many of the linux and palm offerings haven't applied the ever-increasing number of cpu cycles and MB of RAM to using more complex HWR algorithms to provide more accurate and forgiving hand-writing recognition. It's kind of messed up when we now have PDA's running webservers, playing MP3's, and logging into networks using ssh but the state of HWR on many PDA's is not better than it was five years ago running on machines that were 20 times less powerful. Given the linux community's lack of attention to usability issues and incredulous attitudes towards HCI experts, I'm not terribly surpised that most linux PDA's have sucky HWR. But Palm has been saavy about interface design in the past, so they should really know better than to keep grafitti from receiving important and long overdue improvements.
Apple should launch their own satellite from the mothership. Apple has a mothership, you ask? Of course they do. Do you honestly believe the story that the $400 million that Steve Jobs spent buying out next NeXT really went towards million dollar NeXT Cubes and $50,000 toilet seats?
this article on slashdot 8 months ago mentioned that Danger devices would incorporate GPS. I look on their site, and no mention of GPS whatsoever. What gives? I'm kind of dissapointed; I thought I would finally have the problem of "where in the hell did I park my car at the mega-mall" licked.
Matthew Thomas (who does a lot of UI stuff for Mozilla) has written two really good articles that largely answer your question)
Why free software usability tends to suck
Why free software usability tends to suck even more
To address a few things mentioned in your post:
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license
Because Free Software is currently Freedom As A Programmer Envisions It. As the Free Software concept was nutured by Richard M. Stallman, a programmer, this is not surprising. Freedom As An End User Envisions In (also known as The Freedom To Get Stuff Done) has never really been considered by the Free Software community to be a Valid Freedom.
Funny you should mention, I'm currently drawing up a public license that enforces usability and goes after the people who've kept linux so very unusable.
The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world.
I commonly hear this phrase "We've gotten so far on the server, it's only a matter of time before get to the desktop." Unfortunately, this statement makes the assumption that the same abilities, values, and methodologies that lead to success on the server do the same for the desktop. Linux has been doing so well on the server because people in the linux community were really good at doing server stuff. Unfortunately these people were the most absolute worst people you could have ever sent to do desktop stuff. 30 years of anti-newbie RTFM baggage, command-line junkihood, and having a userbase that entirely consists of programmers and sysadmins does not behoove the creation of high quality user interfaces. In contrast, the mac developer community has for 17 years put very strong values on consistancy and non-geeks being able to use the software. That's why they've been able to succeed on the unix desktop in 3 years where linux has failed for the last 7-8.
Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits?
It's already been tried, and has been tried by people with very strong usability/HCI backgrounds. The response they generally get from programmers is "stop whining. If you want to fix something, you should learn how to code". Or sometimes you'll hear "Don't complain about what you get for free". Or "That's what you want, that's not what I want. That's just your opinion."
Or if a usability person criticizes a UI in front of a kernel hacker, the kernel hacker might say "I can't believe that people actually get paid to criticize the work of others" (true story).
When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license
First of all, you have to be pro-active about creating good user interfaces. Users generally do not actively complain about specific application interfaces unless the interfaces are truly, truly, horrible. They will usually passively complain, trying to find execuses to use the program less, or unconsciously creating some workaround, or saying "I hate computers" around the watercooler. You won't get active feedback very often from users, so you need to actively watch them using your UI. So often what makes a UI unbearable is a bunch of little, annoying things that add up to one cumulative bad user experience. To catch those little things, you really have to watch the person using the interfaces. You should also do research ahead of time to learn (before you design the UI) to learn what the most common annoyances are. Unfortunately, most Free Software UI's are cranked out and *then* people try to do active damage control. Much like the world of commercial software, actually.
Another problem with your suggestion is that most of the current userbase for Free Software/OSS are the geeks who've been so clueless about good UI (and some of whom who think that HCI is a load of bull). These people adapt very, very well to badly designed UI's, often priding themselves on doing just that. They often don't take notice of the little, annoying things and are often not confused by ambiguous widget layouts or jargon-laden wording. When you consider these facts, it's not surpising why StarOffice gets such glowing reviews from the geek community. Assuming you manage to find a geek who gives you feedback about the UI, chances are he's not going to a suggestion that jives with all of what we've learned about HCI in the last 20 years. Just because you get feedback doesn't necessarily mean its usable feedback.
Hope I've answered a few of your questions.
If you're kinda handy with Sendmail, and CEO stubbornly refuses to believe that SMTP From: headers can be faked, guess how surpised he'll be when he receives an email from gwbush@whitehouse.gov giving you a full pardon.
We've bested Steve's Ballmer's spaniard and we've beaten his giant. Like we didn't see a battle of wits coming....
Compare and Contrast
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."--William Blake