Last year when ESR came to talk to my LUG, we had conversation about the usability of Open Source software. I told him that most UI designers suggest designing the UI before major parts of the code are written. His response:
"Then they're wrong".
I hope with this latest incident in mind that Eric might re-evaluate some of his long-held beliefs.
The original Palm PDA had similar origins. The creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, carved a block of wood into a size that would comfortably fit into his shirt pocket, and using a "stylus" made from a whittled-down chopstick walked around Palm inc. for a month or two entering dates and phone numbers and taking the thing with him to meetings.
In my opinion, this is the way you should design any technology product; user experience first, technical stuff, code, and engineering later.
The points laid down in your post precisely illustrates why people from the mac community, those who have been utterly disgusted with microsoft's two decades of bad usability and non-innovation, should take their ideals and ideologies about how technology should be designed and migrate these ideas to their own Open Source linux desktop project. The "Linux Macs" (for lack of a better term) could then make use of the cheap x86 boxes that Apple could never take advantage of, and finally compete on the points of usability and user experience that were always obscured by a higher sticker price.
I say that it's about high time to we mac folk take the Mac vs. Windows battle into linux land, creating a third desktop environment that give GNOME and KDE a serious run for their money.
I fully agree that a properly designed UI makes or breaks a PDA, and that Sharp/Trolltech have been producing 3 years of brokenness.
But it's the fact the linux hackers lack the horse sense to do stuff like minimize the number of taps it takes to somthing, not make widgets have borders that consume massive amounts of screen real-estate, and to not try to make the PDA act like a small desktop. Understanding these important issues does not require money and it certainly has nothing to do with openness of code.
Don't blame Open Source for linux PDA's sucking. Blame the unix hacker culture that dominates Open Source for linux PDA's sucking. It's this culture that is unwilling to understand essential mobile design principles that are so necessary to make a great PDA.
Yet one more argument for why we need to divorce the concept of Open Source from the culture of Unix.
So [KDE] haven't published a fancy guideline manual with all kinds of rules everyone has to follow. Big deal!
And people wonder why linux has had such terrible trouble getting a foothold on the desktop. It seems ridiculous that linux folks are so worried about external threats like SCO preventing mainstream adoption when the people within their own community have done a far more excellent job of doing this.
II keep hearing this complaint, but I just don't see it. KDE has/always/ been more useable than GNOME, and still is.
More usable, huh? More consistent, huh? Then why for the past seven years did they use the word "Directory" as opposed to "Folder?" If KDE was really more usable than GNOME, then why did they have such trouble matching the metaphor with terminology? I won't bother going into a long-winded rant about this, since I've already done it in my pre-faq.
(To be fair, GNOME also made this ridiculously stupid design mistake for the first several years of existence. As the people who made that stupid decision back then are still the people running GNOME now, I have just as little respect for GNOME usability-wise as I have for KDE. I don't defend GNOME, I only attack stupidity.)
After that it seemed that they started removing features for no reason, or little reason.
The good thing GNOME did was realize it was superemely jammed with clutter in every part of the user interface, severely hurint the user experience and began a campaign of making things cleaner. Unfortunately, to somewhat corroborate the parent post, GNOME seemed to remove options without thinking about what they were really removing, sometimes removing something just because it was an option.
AND SINCE NORMAL USERS WOULD NEVER HAVE CLICKED, IT IN NO WAY DEGRADES EASE OF USE TO HAVE THE OPTIONS THERE. Options hidden in plain quickly-accessed sight is GOOD.
Anyone who has any background in either cognitive psychology or human computer interaction (two fields especially related to the science of making usable user interfaces) will tell you that the more things objects you put in front of the user, the longer it will take them to visually scan all those objects for the things they want. There is also something called Hicks' Law, which states that for every choice available, the time it takes for the user to make a choice will increase. So when you jam a menu with 6 zillion options, what you are in effect doing is making it more difficult for the user to find the things that they need and longer to make choices about things they want to select.
This "Too many small icons" arguement doesn't hold water. Maybe there are for YOU, so right click and change them! For GNOME, they've decided being able to suit your environmnt to your needs is BAD, so they give me what is acceptable to the LOWEST common user skillset.
Again, longer visual search times. In addition, Fitts' Law (another usability person metric), states that the time it takes to hit a visual target (i.e. something like a button) decreases with the size of the target. In other words, the larger the button, the easier it is to hit and the fast you can hit it. So really small buttons are really hard to hit fast (and accurately).
The technical people think differently because they know better, the nontechnical people don't think about it enough for it to make much difference whate metaphor s being used. If the goal is being easier to use, then the GUI should make things easier, not conform to a model which might, And, incidentally, being "in line with the desktop metaphor" is NOT a valid reason to configure a GUI one way or another. The desktop metaphor is merely a minor convenience, I practically guarantee that it is not how most people actually think of their computers
When we end-users have problems with the usability of OSS software, OSS developers tell us to quit complaining about what we get for free. Then when we shrug our shoulders and say "with OSS you get what you pay for", the a priori conclusion to their very own statement, we are told "how dare you insult OSS developers and the work that they do".
...that makes me not feel guilty about using a mac instead of Linux.
After seeing five years of kernel hackers and people working on OSS desktop projects like GNOME and KDE telling end-users to quit whining about what they get for free or to shut up and write stuff themselves, any warm and squishy feeling I once had using Linux has totally evaporated.
It's not only the beeping of alarm clocks, or the fact that they wake you up in the middle of your threesome with Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Alarm clocks have some of the worst human interfaces around. Many make it far too easy to set the wrong time (the AM/PM dot hell), and many are a true pain in the ass to set, forcing one to take up to a minute just to cycle to the time you want.
Given that your typical alarm clock possesses a fraction of the technology of a simple PDA and designing the technology of one shouldn't be that complex, it's kind of pathetic that after all these years the design of your typical alarm lock user interface still sucks.
Sure, some people will probably laugh and blow off this criticism mere nitpicking, but I wouldn't be surprised if employees' difficulty setting alarm clocks has cost businesses as much per year as the common cold .
I think it's mostly likely that 50 years into the future we'll have 15-30% fewer spotted owls and white tigers and 15-30% more Velcro Sheep and Mice That Piss Vodka.
Would the terrorists be dumb enough to believe that after 9-11 several dozen passengers on the plane would be dumb enough to buy the line "do as we tell you, don't fight back, and you'll come home alive"?
NASA Administrator: So, what the hell happened to our probe?
NASA Scientist: We think that it got sucked through a black hole and got seriously upgraded by omnipotent living machines. We'll probably see it again in several hundred years when it returns as an entity called B'agel that threatens to destroy the earth in it's question for knowledge. Hey, it could happen...
Thanks for the suggestion. However, I think that part of the fun of monopoly is the tactile nature of the game. There's just something about handling the money the appeals to the greedy bastard in us all.
Today, I was thinking about the customized monopoly game that I got last night ("NC Stateopoloy", an NC State version). As all monopoly games follow a general template (a "GO" you pass, utilities, etc), there's gotta be a way to write a program that lets you put in your own customized values for properties, community chests, etc and prints out on 6-8 sheets of high-quality paper a life-size monopoly board (as well as all the cards that you'd need).
Of course, Parker Brothers law dept would have a field day with such an Open Source project. But one can always dream.
About 9 months ago, Eric Raymond came to speak at my LUG. No matter what else I think of him, he's really intersting and a really good speaker. I wouldn't for a moment knock his entertainment value, no matter what else I might have to say about the guy.
However, there was this one point during this discussing at the dinner before his speech where me and several of the LUG members were talking with him about linux GUI's and the future of the Linux Desktop. Eric Raymond said something about the whole unix system of creating back ends first and then grafting GUI's on to those later.
My response: "But Eric, most usability experts recommend you design the interface first and then write the code".
His response: "then they're wrong."
My response: "But what if there's something that the backend folks didn't think of when they wrote there code that the GUI really needs? Or what if there's something in the back-end that just doesn't work once you add a GUI?"
His response: "then it needs to be fixed."
My response: "But what if so much code has already been written that no programmer wants to go back and make all the changes necessary to make it really work?"
His response: "then we've got a problem."
It was at this moment I realized two things:
The Open Source leadership is just stuck in command-line land as your typical rabid, BOFH linux zealot, and is just as clueless about designing desktop software and user interfaces. They leaders of Open Source are as desktopically bankrupt as their followers, and it is unbelievably disturbing that people like this are placed in charge of leading efforts to make alternatives to windows for non-technical users.
For Free Software/Open Source to succeed in being a viable alternative for non-programmers, it must be once and for all divorced from the Unix Culture. The concept of freely distributable and modifiable code must be seperated from the concept of The Unix Way.
There already is anti-wireless technology. It's called a refrigerator, and anytime I get near mine, my wi-fi connection goes dead.
That being said, I think a refrigerator implanted in the body would kick ass. It would block snooping wi-fi signals, and your beer would be as cold after you drink it as it was before.
Actually, there are some similarities between the story of the Lord of the Rings and Jewish folklore about golems. A quote from this article
"Although the creature was mighty in strength, supernatural in prescience, and ever alert in following the orders of his Cabalistic creator, so that he saved the Jews of Prague from many a calamity, nonetheless, his creator decided to "unmake" him because he had grown afraid of the creature he had created, for the Golem, waxing drunk with the immense power he was wielding, menaced the entire Jewish community, even trying to bend the Maharal to his will, which had now turned evil and destructive. Thereupon, using the secret gematria of Cabalistic formulas for the second time, the Maharal returned the clay hulk of his creature to its original inanimate condition by withdrawing from its mouth the Shem, the life-creating, ineffable Name of God that he had placed there when first he made him."
The golem, in spite of all the good it could potentially do, is a power so great that it corrupts everything around it, and a decision is made to return it from whence it came because no one person should ever have that much power.
The new Battlestar Galactica is a blatant attempt to build/rip off of a much beloved late 70's sci-fi classic....what could be possibly truer to the original formula?
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Last year when ESR came to talk to my LUG, we had conversation about the usability of Open Source software. I told him that most UI designers suggest designing the UI before major parts of the code are written. His response:
"Then they're wrong".
I hope with this latest incident in mind that Eric might re-evaluate some of his long-held beliefs.
The original Palm PDA had similar origins. The creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, carved a block of wood into a size that would comfortably fit into his shirt pocket, and using a "stylus" made from a whittled-down chopstick walked around Palm inc. for a month or two entering dates and phone numbers and taking the thing with him to meetings.
In my opinion, this is the way you should design any technology product; user experience first, technical stuff, code, and engineering later.
Steve Jobs must have replied to one of those anonymous e-mails titled "GET OUT OF DEBT NOW".
The points laid down in your post precisely illustrates why people from the mac community, those who have been utterly disgusted with microsoft's two decades of bad usability and non-innovation, should take their ideals and ideologies about how technology should be designed and migrate these ideas to their own Open Source linux desktop project. The "Linux Macs" (for lack of a better term) could then make use of the cheap x86 boxes that Apple could never take advantage of, and finally compete on the points of usability and user experience that were always obscured by a higher sticker price.
I say that it's about high time to we mac folk take the Mac vs. Windows battle into linux land, creating a third desktop environment that give GNOME and KDE a serious run for their money.I fully agree that a properly designed UI makes or breaks a PDA, and that Sharp/Trolltech have been producing 3 years of brokenness.
But it's the fact the linux hackers lack the horse sense to do stuff like minimize the number of taps it takes to somthing, not make widgets have borders that consume massive amounts of screen real-estate, and to not try to make the PDA act like a small desktop. Understanding these important issues does not require money and it certainly has nothing to do with openness of code.
Don't blame Open Source for linux PDA's sucking. Blame the unix hacker culture that dominates Open Source for linux PDA's sucking. It's this culture that is unwilling to understand essential mobile design principles that are so necessary to make a great PDA.
Yet one more argument for why we need to divorce the concept of Open Source from the culture of Unix.
So [KDE] haven't published a fancy guideline manual with all kinds of rules everyone has to follow. Big deal!
And people wonder why linux has had such terrible trouble getting a foothold on the desktop. It seems ridiculous that linux folks are so worried about external threats like SCO preventing mainstream adoption when the people within their own community have done a far more excellent job of doing this.
II keep hearing this complaint, but I just don't see it. KDE has
More usable, huh? More consistent, huh? Then why for the past seven years did they use the word "Directory" as opposed to "Folder?" If KDE was really more usable than GNOME, then why did they have such trouble matching the metaphor with terminology? I won't bother going into a long-winded rant about this, since I've already done it in my pre-faq.
(To be fair, GNOME also made this ridiculously stupid design mistake for the first several years of existence. As the people who made that stupid decision back then are still the people running GNOME now, I have just as little respect for GNOME usability-wise as I have for KDE. I don't defend GNOME, I only attack stupidity.)
After that it seemed that they started removing features for no reason, or little reason.
The good thing GNOME did was realize it was superemely jammed with clutter in every part of the user interface, severely hurint the user experience and began a campaign of making things cleaner. Unfortunately, to somewhat corroborate the parent post, GNOME seemed to remove options without thinking about what they were really removing, sometimes removing something just because it was an option.
AND SINCE NORMAL USERS WOULD NEVER HAVE CLICKED, IT IN NO WAY DEGRADES EASE OF USE TO HAVE THE OPTIONS THERE. Options hidden in plain quickly-accessed sight is GOOD.
Anyone who has any background in either cognitive psychology or human computer interaction (two fields especially related to the science of making usable user interfaces) will tell you that the more things objects you put in front of the user, the longer it will take them to visually scan all those objects for the things they want. There is also something called Hicks' Law, which states that for every choice available, the time it takes for the user to make a choice will increase. So when you jam a menu with 6 zillion options, what you are in effect doing is making it more difficult for the user to find the things that they need and longer to make choices about things they want to select.
This "Too many small icons" arguement doesn't hold water. Maybe there are for YOU, so right click and change them! For GNOME, they've decided being able to suit your environmnt to your needs is BAD, so they give me what is acceptable to the LOWEST common user skillset.
Again, longer visual search times. In addition, Fitts' Law (another usability person metric), states that the time it takes to hit a visual target (i.e. something like a button) decreases with the size of the target. In other words, the larger the button, the easier it is to hit and the fast you can hit it. So really small buttons are really hard to hit fast (and accurately).
The technical people think differently because they know better, the nontechnical people don't think about it enough for it to make much difference whate metaphor s being used. If the goal is being easier to use, then the GUI should make things easier, not conform to a model which might,
And, incidentally, being "in line with the desktop metaphor" is NOT a valid reason to configure a GUI one way or another. The desktop metaphor is merely a minor convenience, I practically guarantee that it is not how most people actually think of their computers
Usability is all about creating one consiste
Don't worry about the space program. We'll go back to the moon once George Bush discovers the moon has weapons of destruction.
When we end-users have problems with the usability of OSS software, OSS developers tell us to quit complaining about what we get for free. Then when we shrug our shoulders and say "with OSS you get what you pay for", the a priori conclusion to their very own statement, we are told "how dare you insult OSS developers and the work that they do".
How very confusing.
...that makes me not feel guilty about using a mac instead of Linux.
After seeing five years of kernel hackers and people working on OSS desktop projects like GNOME and KDE telling end-users to quit whining about what they get for free or to shut up and write stuff themselves, any warm and squishy feeling I once had using Linux has totally evaporated.
If both people in the accident had BlueTooth-capable cell phones, their asses could exchange contact numbers and insurance information.
It's not only the beeping of alarm clocks, or the fact that they wake you up in the middle of your threesome with Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Alarm clocks have some of the worst human interfaces around. Many make it far too easy to set the wrong time (the AM/PM dot hell), and many are a true pain in the ass to set, forcing one to take up to a minute just to cycle to the time you want.
Given that your typical alarm clock possesses a fraction of the technology of a simple PDA and designing the technology of one shouldn't be that complex, it's kind of pathetic that after all these years the design of your typical alarm lock user interface still sucks.
Sure, some people will probably laugh and blow off this criticism mere nitpicking, but I wouldn't be surprised if employees' difficulty setting alarm clocks has cost businesses as much per year as the common cold .
I think it's mostly likely that 50 years into the future we'll have 15-30% fewer spotted owls and white tigers and 15-30% more Velcro Sheep and Mice That Piss Vodka.
Would the terrorists be dumb enough to believe that after 9-11 several dozen passengers on the plane would be dumb enough to buy the line "do as we tell you, don't fight back, and you'll come home alive"?
NASA Administrator: So, what the hell happened to our probe?
NASA Scientist: We think that it got sucked through a black hole and got seriously upgraded by omnipotent living machines. We'll probably see it again in several hundred years when it returns as an entity called B'agel that threatens to destroy the earth in it's question for knowledge. Hey, it could happen...
Thanks for the suggestion. However, I think that part of the fun of monopoly is the tactile nature of the game. There's just something about handling the money the appeals to the greedy bastard in us all.
I had wondered why the guy who won all my chocolate coins kept fiddling with his sony-ericsson phone.
Today, I was thinking about the customized monopoly game that I got last night ("NC Stateopoloy", an NC State version). As all monopoly games follow a general template (a "GO" you pass, utilities, etc), there's gotta be a way to write a program that lets you put in your own customized values for properties, community chests, etc and prints out on 6-8 sheets of high-quality paper a life-size monopoly board (as well as all the cards that you'd need).
Of course, Parker Brothers law dept would have a field day with such an Open Source project. But one can always dream.
However, there was this one point during this discussing at the dinner before his speech where me and several of the LUG members were talking with him about linux GUI's and the future of the Linux Desktop. Eric Raymond said something about the whole unix system of creating back ends first and then grafting GUI's on to those later.
My response: "But Eric, most usability experts recommend you design the interface first and then write the code".
His response: "then they're wrong."
My response: "But what if there's something that the backend folks didn't think of when they wrote there code that the GUI really needs? Or what if there's something in the back-end that just doesn't work once you add a GUI?"
His response: "then it needs to be fixed."
My response: "But what if so much code has already been written that no programmer wants to go back and make all the changes necessary to make it really work?"
His response: "then we've got a problem."
It was at this moment I realized two things:
Perplexed scientists try to explain why every 33 days the rover Spirit goes on the fritz and craves chocolate.
There already is anti-wireless technology. It's called a refrigerator, and anytime I get near mine, my wi-fi connection goes dead.
That being said, I think a refrigerator implanted in the body would kick ass. It would block snooping wi-fi signals, and your beer would be as cold after you drink it as it was before.
The golem, in spite of all the good it could potentially do, is a power so great that it corrupts everything around it, and a decision is made to return it from whence it came because no one person should ever have that much power.
Sound vaguely familiar?
Actually, I think Tom Lehrer is a bigger threat to pigeon network security.
Print out the French edition. It's like wiping your ass with silk.
In other words, blowjobs and dismemberment of enemies might require a few more upgrades
.
The new Battlestar Galactica is a blatant attempt to build/rip off of a much beloved late 70's sci-fi classic....what could be possibly truer to the original formula?