How To Fix the Poor Usability of Free Software 690
flosofl writes "Matthew Paul Thomas has an entry on his blog called Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, And How To Improve It. While this advice is helpful and may indeed lead to improvements in many open source programs, the guidelines may be much more difficult for smaller projects. From the entry, 'Free Software has a long and healthy tradition of "show me the code." But when someone points out a usability issue, this tradition turns into "patches welcome," which is unhelpful since most designers aren't programmers. And it's not obvious how else usability specialists should help out.'" Thomas has been developing the ideas in this essay for years. The critique is comprehensive, listing 15 challenges in the way software projects, and in particular free software projects, are structured, with suggestions for improving each one.
Re:Usability is a matter of opinion (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed. Understanding usability is a totally different discipline to coding. One can easily do either without being able to do the other. The problem is that proper solutions to usability problems need proper foundations laid. Complaints about the foundations of usability tend to fall on deaf ears in the Free Software community -- certainly those who care are in the minority.
Re:Style over substance? (Score:5, Informative)
You're confusing graphic design and UI design. They're completely separate disciplines.
Most UI designers I've met are not good graphic designers, and most good graphic designers I've met are not good UI designers.
Re:Usability expert with a (little) bit of free ti (Score:2, Informative)
There's always... (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work at the company which started it. It's a platform for free software developers to meet usability specialists, and so far it's coming quite good. The KDE 4 HIG was designed by us ("us" as i still used to work there at the time this was done), and the people working there are certainly bright minded people, but there's always friction at the implementation front. In my experience it's not neccessarily easy to convince a developer that a given usability decision is the right one, even if someone with a background in usability makes the proposal.
Re:Usability is a matter of opinion (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Usability is a matter of opinion (Score:3, Informative)
Actually if you are an advanced engineering student using a CAD program, you will almost certainly spend most of the time using the command line interface. Have you actually used AutoCAD, say? It has a command line interface at the bottom of the screen because it's a lot easier to type out the command to draw a line of a certain size, snapping to given points, than to do that with the GUI.
Re:Usability is a matter of opinion (Score:3, Informative)
The trouble starts with Gimp not having one animation system, but two. One is simply layer based with one layer for each frame, which works fine for really simple stuff, but starts to cause trouble with more complex stuff (transparent layers can't be properly previewed, changing fps for preview isn't easily possible, only one layer per frame, etc.). The other system is GAP, which works by having one .xcf file per frame, which fixes a few shortcomings of the other, but adds plenty of its own. For one thing you have to save your image under a special name before you can start animating, which is not only awkward, but also causes plenty of other problems. Gimp doesn't have proper access to all frames, but only to the current one, the GAP plug-in swaps the images more or less behind Gimps back. This not only causes performance issues, but also the loss of undo across frames as well as the loss of many other operations that should work across frame borders. Onionskins for example are awkward to setup and then appear as normal layers in your images, instead of being invisible or somehow special.
However, none of this come as a surprise or is the fault of GAP itself, since it is all the natural consequence of Gimps layer system not being all that flexible and GAP then just being a hack around all that. A proper way to fix the issue would involve to first make Gimps layer system more flexible, adding cloning, special layers, groups, etc. and then adding a new animation system on top of that, so that a frame can be handled as proper layer group. With GEGL getting closer that might happen one day, but it still might take a while.
Re:Read Gruber's post too (Score:4, Informative)
This post really annoyed me.
Go to http://bugs.kde.org/ [kde.org] and have a look at the types of bug reports we get and look at the responses.
I personally work on the task manager. I get around 1 bug report a day. Out of them, perhaps 1 in 20 is a suggestion for improving usability. And I have never received anything approaching a UI design document.
I have registered my app on www.openusability.org as well as with the internal kde usability group, and I browse forums for suggestions. And despite all this, I _still_ have not found a usability expert who has time to work on this app.
For the whole of the KDE project we have I think only 1 (maybe 2?) trained usability experts. There is far more demand than supply.
The fact is that people are willing to bitch about some app not being usable, but they are far less likely to put the effort into trying to come up with a good alternative solution and work with developers to get it implemented.
Re:Usability is a matter of opinion (Score:2, Informative)
The screenshots are beautiful. The description sounds lovely.
Aesthetics and marketing are not User Centred Design, but a lot of people think it is.
Re:Really a matter of taste... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, this is one reason why free software ui's tend to suck.
"Usability is mostly a function of what the user is used to".
Incorrect. While consistency is important so are many other factors such as information organization and display, discoverability of core features, support for internationalization, localization and accessability.
"I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done"
Which puts you in a very small minority, and disqualifies you from making any useful observations about usability in general.
"I don't really think it's possible to quantify "usability""
Incorrect. It is very much possible to measure usability with user testing and similar studies - it has been happening for decades.
"when to most people it's best rendered as "similarity to Microsoft products."
Incorrect, given Microsoft just recently redesigned the user interface for their two top products, Windows and Office, even these "gold standards" have much room for improvement.
/Mike