What Open Source Can Learn From Apple 309
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ScuttleMonkey
from the good-design-always-a-good-idea dept.
from the good-design-always-a-good-idea dept.
Linux and open source have long struggled to gain acceptance from the wider (read: non-technical) audience. This has improved in recent years, but still has a long way to go. Columnist Matt Asay suggests that perhaps open source projects should attempt to emulate Apple's design philosophy, with whoever succeeds becoming the "winner" of the hearts and minds of the vast majority of users. "Some projects already accomplish this to some extent. The strength of Mozilla, for example, is that it has figured out how to enable 40 percent of its development to be done by outside contributors, as BusinessWeek recently wrote. The downside is that these contributors are techies, but the upside is that they're techies who add language packs, accessibility features, and other "niche" areas that Mozilla might otherwise struggle to deliver. This suggests a start: enable your open-source project to accept meaningful outside contributions that make the project reflective of a wider development community. But the real goldmine is broadening the definition of "developer" to include lay users of your software. The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won."
user analytics (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the article that user involvement is key. However, users are clueless about what they really want and you can't possibly use them to write the specs of your product! On the other hand, developers tend to reject criticism from end-users because they lack technical expertise.
I can think of one approach that might work: build a really good analytics library that would measure various usability aspects. Applied to Firefox for instance, it could generate data on how the average user goes about finding a particular setting, how long it takes them to perform a given action, etc.
Developers would respect the hard, factual data that the analytics would generate. It would make it easier for the minority of usability engineers to argue against feature creep.
It's not about contributers (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about standards. Apple's UI guidelines are very well written, and very well thought out. When developing your app, you don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about the proper place to put something, because it's generally obvious. This makes it so much more user friendly as a user can pick up on things in a very intuitive way. It also gives a general "feel" to the entire operating system.
When working with Objective-C/Cocoa in XCode, your almost forced to give your app a very Mac like feel to it. The same goes for the iPhone. Everything you'd want in your interface is already pre-built, so everybody's apps have a familiar feel. I know I've heard the exact opposite when developing for something like the Blackberry.
Having more people contribute with no clear guidance will just make things worse.
Linux users... (Score:4, Insightful)
... only care about EXCLUSIVITY.
I want to make clear that I like Linux and free software; in fact I'm writing this from Mandriva Linux. But we have to accept the awful truth: many Linux users would be using Mac OS X if they weren't a misers. Why do I say that? Because even if it hurts to all of us, I have to say that the Linux community doesn't appreciate quality and freedom.
Normally, Linux software DOESN'T have the same quality that propietary software has. It's normal, it is not bad. After all, free software is free (as in speech) and the other one is costly... No one would use MS Project if GNOME Planner did have the same quality. Is good to have freeware software for things that are not serious, though.
The other reason why someone decides to use Linux is to read the source code, it is a good reason. But let's be serious, how many of you read the code of every update your apps recieve, and when you make sure everything's okay, you compile them and execute them? Nevertheless, I appreaciate the freedom to make modifications. Even myself have modify apps to see on the "About..." screen my own name.
And, the other reason, the reason I would walk on hot coals for it, is that at least 50% of Linux users, use Linux just for exclusivity.Just like Apple is the shit on usability, but more than 50% of Apple users use their products because of the "little apple" logo that appears on the notebook; most of the Linux users don't care about Linux advantages but EXCLUSIVITY.
I would make a difference between two exclusivity types: the miser version of the Macuser, that don't want to spend a buck and uses things like GNOME+Compiz or KDE 4; and the megafriki like Richard Stallman that sees movies with a MPEG-->ASCII converter, edits his web page with a text mode emacs, sees some web pages throught wget, and do everything throught a console while is eating snacks [google.com].
The first group don't care about dislocating their hands rotating a 3D cube, nor that KDE 4.2 only do half of the things KDE 3 can do using more time. The cool things is to have windows that bounce up and down like a good tits. Perhaps that is the closest thing to sex they will have. This kinds of users like Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva... it doesn't matter. After all, they're people without prejudges, that with faith (sometimes thanks to the bad advise that the second group (I will talk about them later) gave them) run from Windows to the freeware Linux.
The second group searches for intellectual exclusivity (as if configure X.org with nano were considered intellectual by someone with a healthy sexual life). They are the typical guys who give you shit because you use MS Office or OpenOffice instead of Latex, the guys who believe they're awesome because they have to type thousands of sequences like "/isearch:qqvv!!" just to edit a text on Vi, the guys who see pages on Lynx and treat you like shit because you use Flash, the guys who think that desktop enviroments are a conspiracy from multinationals companies to force all of us to buy high cost PCs, and the guys who think that, if you use Ubuntu, you're a lammer.
All of them used distributions like Corel, Mandrake, etc. several years ago, distributions that were easy to use (much more easy than Debian or Caldera) and could use lightweight enviroments like IceWM, XFCE, ENlightment... That was enough for them to feel more important than their stupid friends that used Windows, friends that used PCs to do disgraceful things like play videogames, edit rich texts, use scanners or printers, surf on internet with a 56k modem...
With the popularization of distros like Ubuntu, their friends started to switch to Linux, just like they told them before. In fact, they never thought anyone would pay attention to them, and that's why they never thought about the possibility that someday they will not be "superior" to other people because they work for their PCs while everyone else drinks beer or has sex,
What OSS can learn from Apple: (Score:0, Insightful)
Gay people are a market, too !
Nontechnical software user (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a universal. Most software is delivered to nontechnical software users.
Even the specialized mrp and accounting and I bet even the most technical/scientific of software are delivered to nontechnical software users.
Most development approaches begin and end at the source code control systems, by people who don't ever and probably wouldn't want to get near their customer.
Successful development projects do not simply arise from people having the "fun" experience of development. To be successful you will have to do the "not fun" things of supporting your endusers and documentation and attention to the supporting infrastructure that delivers your running software into running systems.
Re:user analytics (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a bit better of a way to put it:
5 out of 10 users know what they want, but can't express it in a manner that communicates it sufficiently well to achieve it.
4 out of 10 users haven't a clue what they want, but think they do.
1 out of 1 users know what they want and can express it.
And then you have the developers, who want to make something with nice nifty features, but don't want to be bothered with the polish.
This reminds me of a friend who is a senior analyist has a paper on her cube wall, I've seen two variants of the theme. It has a picture of a sports car with the caption "What the users want". This is followed by the picture of a UFO (in some variants a fighter jet) with "What the developers want to make". This is followed by "What the company is willing to spend money on" and it has some small compact car. And then finally, a picture of a really funny looking "tricked out" tricycle with the caption "What ends up being produced".
Re:user analytics (Score:4, Insightful)
then lastly in plugins and add-ons that don't require changes to the core of the project. Clearly:
The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project
is referring to things like: addons.mozilla.org [slashdot.org] not to things like adding crud [wikipedia.org] to every projects main branch.
What users want, not what they say they want (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is very good at figuring out what users actually DO with the products - and that includes figuring it out BEFORE the product is released. This in contrast with giving people what they _say_ they want, which rarely satisfies them.
Re:user analytics (Score:4, Insightful)
users are clueless about what they really want
They know what they want. Ask them what they want in a car and they'll say an SUV with room for 8, at least 50 MPG, all the latest gadgets and costs less than $12,000. If you can't provide that then it's your fault.
I mean this for humor's sake but thinking about it I'm scared that it might be an accurate description.
More whining from fashion designers (Score:5, Insightful)
This is bullshit. Bad websites are built people who barely know how to use HTML and Javascript, but believe that the more HTML and Javascript you use, the better the website is. Slashdot, Digg, Gizmodo, Endgadget, Facebook, MySpace - they're all fucking horrible. People believe that because Google can pull it off, they can too. They believe that because they have very fast machines, everyone else does too. The believe that "moar interactive" == "awesome website", and that the more iframes you can pull into one page makes it a "mashup" and very "Web 2.0".
Do you see that kind of shit on the Apple website? Of course not! Apple doesn't succeed because of "design", they succeed because they have production values. They don't tolerate "good enough", they don't fixate on technology because it is new, they don't march to the beat of an ideological imperative. They believe in themselves, and they do what they want because they like it, on the assumption that their tastes are like everyone's tastes. Apple does not live by focus groups. Apple doesn't hold "design" over "technology", they hold "simple" over "complicated". The design wankers attach themselves to Apple's coattails because they can't differentiate between pretty technology and well executed technology. They don't understand technology, so they make a religion out of design so their priests can have something to lord over the unfashionable nerds.
Do you know why so much open source software sucks? It's because the programmers suck! They don't measure themselves against any standard of excellence. They stop when something works, ignoring the fact that it doesn't work well. It's plain old slob apathy. They're not getting paid for it, they can't be fired for failure, so what do they care?
It's about marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
What keeps Apple and Microsoft on top is marketing and momentum. We live in a society driven by mass media. For the most part open-source does not have a sufficient marketing budget. Most people do not even know about alternatives.
Downside? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying the drawback to commercial aircraft is that they are designed by aeronautical engineers.
Re:user analytics (Score:5, Insightful)
"However, users are clueless about what they really want and you can't possibly use them to write the specs of your product!"
This demonstrates the inherent problem with open source's attitude towards user demands. To them you are either (a) a Programmer, or (b) a Grandma.
I'm an IT professional, a power user, and consider myself a connoisseur of good interface design. But I've never coded a line of C++ in my entire life. Does this make my input useless?
For example, I've been trying to get bugs in Thunderbird fixed for a while that seriously impede usability, but the development team doesn't seem to care.
Open source is always talking about how they can win over more users. But how do you win over users if you don't focus on usability?
Re:What users want, not what they say they want (Score:4, Insightful)
At least corporations have an obligation to pretend to care (for better and for worse).
Re:user analytics (Score:2, Insightful)
I get the impression you didn't understand the article then, because quite early on they approvingly cite this (which they attribute to Jason Snell of MacWorld):
They're not simply asking users what they want and then just doing what the users say; that would indeed be a recipe for disaster. They have design people in charge of figuring out what the products should be, validating proposed designs against user focus groups, sitting end-users down for experiments to see how usable something is, discovering usability problems with existing products, etc. And then they use this sort of information to decide what to build.
Won't work. You need to know what the user is trying to do to interpret the data, and the software can't read the user's mind.
Completely misses the point about Apple design (Score:1, Insightful)
Soo, the author clearly has no idea what Apple's design philosophy is. Nothing in this article is even close to how Apple designs software. Users don't contribute to Apple's design. While Apple does solicit feedback regarding its current software, it strongly discourages (http://www.apple.com/legal/policies/ideas.html) idea submissions or other contributions to development. Steve Jobs once quoted Henry Ford regarding how they feel about what customers think they want: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." Apple doesn't care about what users say they want, because users don't think about product development the way Apple does. Apple hires very smart people and pushes them very hard to develop what they do. They're very focused on what they want to achieve and usually dream much bigger than the typical user or outside developer.
Basically, Apple's design philosophy is completely backwards from open source design philosophy, and I believe that's one of Apple's true strengths in its design process and what allows them to bring to market the breakthrough types of products that they do. There are many other design and engineering principles that are also fundamental to Apple's success, but bringing that to the open source world seems like a poor match.
Re:Focus on what the user wants (Score:3, Insightful)
# Use zero modal dialogs. They force the user to act at the software's behest to continue doing what they want. Making the user your software's bitch.
Making
A modal dialog often has value, in that it focuses the user's attention on something that, generally, is necessary to actually do what the user wants. Take Visual Studio for example. If I click "run," and a file has changed since the last build, it'll ask me whether I want to build again before I run the application. You could assume they want to build again, but for some people that may not be what they want, so it asks. Of course, for many workflow options, this only needs to be exposed to the user once. Visual Studio asks me whether I want to build before running, but there's a checkbox that tells it not to ask me again. I check it, click "Yes," and it never bothers me again--but now it acts the way I want it to, every time.
There are many uses of modal dialog boxes that everyone gets wrong, however. No, I don't want to send user statistics ANYWHERE, and you should not be popping up a modal dialog and keeping me from doing what I want in your vain attempt to get me to do so.
Your other points, however, are right on the money. Great post.
Re:It's not about contributers (Score:4, Insightful)
"Apple would never allow that"
What do you mean by this? Both on the desktop and on the iPhone the developer has complete control over virtually every pixel of their interface (I haven't messed with drawing in the menu bar proper, as you can do custom drawing in menu items, but I'm not sure drawing the title's in the menu bar itself).
Hell, Apple itself deviates from it's own standards, as well as wildly popular applications such as Delicious Library (just as an example). Apple has always expounded that they have "guidelines", not "rules" or "laws" or "requirements".
Re:I Can Tell You This About Users (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm (Score:2, Insightful)
The major problem is in fact that people who control a project can be incredibly hostile to doing things that improve usability, and will just not compromise because they see no reason to do so.
A relevant example: Linus's uncompromisingly negative attitude toward Unicode normalization of filenames [kerneltrap.org]. OS X's HFS+ filesystem guarantees that all names are stored in normalized UTF-8; Linux's ext3 apparently just lets you use whatever you want. This means that in a Linux system, you could search for a file called Martínez.txt (note the accent on the "i"), search for a file whose name contains the subtstring Martínez, and not get a match because the filename and the search string are using two different representations of the accented "i". Or, from the user point of view, you get a search term that doesn't match itself.
At any rate, you do seem to agree that getting project owners to accept usability contributions is an obstacle. What I want to point out is that very often the obstacle is just not practically surmountable, period.
Re:Downside? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't fly based on the make of the plane. I fly based on the customer service the airline offers.
Re:What users want, not what they say they want (Score:3, Insightful)
You think Free Software developers pander to what users say they want?! I can't think of any more group more intransigently opposed to doing anything other than scratching the itches that satisfy their particular use cases.
This is truth, folks. I made a suggestion to the gEDA PCB developers, asking if they could implement a feature found in pretty much every commercial PCB layout package -- display the netname in every footprint pad. Seriously, this is a standard feature. And the tepid response from the developers? Something along the lines of, "Huh? I've never seen that ... and anyways, I can't imagine how that could be useful."
And, with that, I unsubscribed from the gEDA mailing lists, deleted all of the sources and dev builds from my machine, and went back to using the paid-for and perfectly functional schematic capture/PCB layout tool I had been using.
Re:I Can Tell You This About Users (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you that a lot of projects could use better or more descriptive names, but you've gotta realize that 99% of the time these are people's personal projects that they are either working on because it has some utility to them or because they just want to get experience.
That's fine, and God Bless. Keeps 'em off the streets, and all that.
But every time someone criticizes Linux for not having an app that does what such-and-such closed source app does, the response is invariably, "Whaddya mean? KgnuSMEGMA is out of pre-Alpha and does EVERYTHING that program does, and once Joey gets home from camp he's going to be spending the rest of the summer building a killer GUI for all the lusers who don't like the CLI."
Personal project? Or alternative to proprietary commercial? You may choose one.
Re:It's not about contributers (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies that are successful in this field have UI experts -- and the management to back them up -- to say
"Yes, this works adequately, but it looks awful. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but it doesn't blend well with the rest of our product line. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but it's hard to use. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but there's too many extraneous features. Sorry, you can't ship it."
(And of course, the ever popular "It was a nice product, but we're abandoning it for something simpler, prettier, and not overburdened with legacy.")
UI guidelines give everyone a place to start talking about the problems (looks/blend/hard/extraneous) and give the development teams a starting point. If there truly is an earth-shattering eye-popping UI feature (a widget) that the guidelines don't allow, then you alter the guidelines after buy in. This *then* requires re-engineering the rest of the applications to account for that great widget and use it where applicable to maintain consistency.
It's expensive and it may seems pointless, but no app is an island when you're trying to engineer a great user-experience.
Linux generally tries to compensate by providing standard frameworks for UI. But there's the I-Love-Standards-There's-So-Many-To-Choose-From problem and that there'll always be the cowboy that turns out a useful app that looks and works different from everything else.
Re:Rebuttal quote (Score:5, Insightful)
(so you submit a patch)...
Re:user analytics (Score:2, Insightful)
Because I can appreciate and judge great cuisine, doesn't mean I can make it, yet the feedback these judges provide is the cornerstone for a chefs continuous improvement. People who use and judge interfaces in the field are usually a great resource to find ways to improve it. If it is a hit to the interface designers ego that some interface element isn't where the users would like it to be, suck it up. Make it better, always improve it.
Re:Linux users... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Downside? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you're running a commercial airline and you allow the aeronautical engineers to design the interior of the aircraft (including seats, lighting, fixtures) without including anyone with interior design experience, then yes, that might be a problem. If you allow the aeronautical engineers to design the menu for the inflight meals without consulting any kind of chef or caterer, then that might be a problem too.
Further (Score:3, Insightful)
1 out of 1(0) users know what they want and can express it.
5 out of 10 times they want something that can't be done.
4 out of 10 times they want something that can be done but shouldn't.
1 out of 10 times they want something both worthwhile and achievable.
Re:What users want, not what they say they want (Score:3, Insightful)
I think his point was that if they hadn't used other programs to see:
a) what features they had, and
b) why they had those features at all
then their product would be theoretical at best, and not take into account several factors that would make it a useful and productive tool.
His attitude may be sub-optimal, but that doesn't mean that his point is invalid.
My experience with EMC2, an open-source milling program, has been expectional. The chat rooms are full of helpful people, we ran some experiments, and in the end, we found a way to configure a gamepad ($20) to work like a jog wheel ($1000).
My experience with Ubuntu at home has been complete shit. I still can't look at Youtube, Flash is troublesome at best, and apparently it's my fault for not buying a new machine every year. "Why would you have that card? It's ATI and it's, like, 4 years old. Get a new nVidia card and it'll work."
Re:user analytics (Score:3, Insightful)
Close. To open source developers you are either (a) The developer himself, or (b) Not the developer himself. If (b) then the excuse is either (i) you are a Programmer - develop it yourself, or (ii) you are non-technical - I can ignore your input.
You cannot! Usability is very important. And everyone should concentrate on it. But not me right now, I just have this nifty little feature to add for myself/my close friend/etc.
Closed-source and other funded software can pay people for the unfun work of UI design and documentation.
The Truth About Commercial vs. Open Source (Score:3, Insightful)
The Truth About Commercial vs. Open Source ...is that in a commercial setting, there is dictatorial editorial control, and people are willing to work on things they wouldn't ordinarily work on for the joy of it, in trade for money.
Without that, there's no way to prioritize customer input ahead of developer desires, and there's no way to get a developer to work on something that they disagree with.
The closest the Open Source community has come to this are companies like Mozilla, RedHat, and Ubuntu, which are large participants in particular Open Source projects, but which internally exercise a single editorial philosophy over the product, and have paid engineers to work on the things that no one would work on at all, if it weren't for the money.
I have absolutely no idea (and I expect no one else does, either) how you would cause a bug report to be responded to in a timely fashion and get it resolved to the satisfaction of the person who filed it, in an Open Source project, unless the person who filed it wrote the fix, and the fix was acceptable to the some pigs who were more equal than others in the project. Most large changes to Open Source projects are arbitrated by a board of people who are self-selecting, who are there because of seniority, or nepotism, or as a result of a popularity contest. From such groups, you're going to get consensus. Anything that goes against that is going to get strong resistance, even if the consensus is basically what Frank Herbert called a "demopoll", which means you will always end up with the lowest common denominator.
Great products (and terrible ones) require an 800 pound gorilla to force its views on the participants, and for those participants to be willing to stick around despite the force.
-- Terry
Re:It's about marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people do not even know about alternatives.
Even if they did, installing and configuring an OS is much, much more complex than what a lot of computer users can (and should) handle.
Re:More whining from fashion designers (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not only confused, you're miss informed. The iPhone was specifically designed to be a smart phone. Not only that it was the iPod touch that followed the iPhone.
Furthermore, they got the phone right the first time. I own a first generation iPhone and am completely happy with it. I'm not even compelled to upgrade (AT&T is a different story). The industry has barely started to catchup (there might be something to the Pre, etc).
Sure the eMate was a flop, but you're talking about historic Apple Computer, not Apple Inc. proper. I don't think they've flopped since the eMate (their netbook as you say). Certainly nothing has flopped after the release of the original iMac.
And you really shouldn't reference belligerent bloggers when you are attempting to make a point. That guy is as laughable as he is loony.
Re:I Can Tell You This About Users (Score:5, Insightful)
(posting again because somehow my other post turned out all fucked up)
> If we live in a world where a good image manipulating application is overlooked
> because its name is GIMP, there is something wrong with the world.
No, actually it is overlooked because people balk at the terrible interface and go back to Photoshop.
Re:I Can Tell You This About Users (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck marketing! Just give people the free and open truth.
Let me guess ... you're an engineer?
Seriously, I think the problem here is you are confusing marketing with spin. Marketing actually encompasses a LOT of useful things, not just spin - and most F/OSS projects could REALLY use them. The definition of marketing includes:
It's a common mistake among technical people to think that marketing only includes that last item. Just like many sales or marketing people misunderstand what "technical people" do...
iPhoto is great for what it is (Score:3, Insightful)
Two points:
It can't learn ANYTHING (Score:1, Insightful)
Linux is NOT Microsoft Windows and it is NOT Apples OSX and it is NOT HP-UX or anything else.
The strength of linux (and with this I mean the whole opensource enviroment that you can find on a ubuntu CD) is that it is its own thing.
You have Ford and it produces cars that appeal to some people. You have Ferrari and those cars to appeal to some. But you also got people who build their own cars (possibly from kits) and that is a market too.
It would be absolutely silly to ask a kit-car to have the same build qualities as a porche or the same features as a mercedes.
The people who want linux to learn from either apple or MS are the same who would put a radio in a ferrari or an airbag on a buggati. Or for that matter require that a dune buggy has an airco.
Linux is what it is because it is what it is. That includes a thousand techies "designing" software to their own tastes. If you happen to like their taste, you are in luck. If you don't... well then you either become a techie or pay someone to be a techie for you OR buy Apple/MS.
What always amazes me in these type of stories is that non-linux users seems to thinkthey can demand unpaid linux developers to dance to their tunes, yet happily pay both MS and Apple to NOT listen to them. I told apple not to go to Intel and did they listen? I told MS to not do Vista DRM and did they listen?
Before you try to tell linux developers how to their their hobby, try telling the people you actually PAY how to do theirs. Get safari the way you want it if you want to bitch about the mozilla team not listening.
For that matter, if you want linux to listen to customers, then you need to talk to RedHat or Ubuntu or whatever. They are the ones who have customers. Linux does NOT have customers. It has developers and users. If the user does not like what the developer does he first has to become a customer. Good luck with that.