This link has been bookmarked by 103 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Aug 2008, by Jeff Johnson.
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Dušan MiletićMatthew Paul Thomas discusses how FOSS's frequent poor usability and interface design can be improved.
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how satisfied they are when they’re finished
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Antonio Volponhe best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process its
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lencielBut we got the code
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Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it
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Weak incentives for usability. Proprietary software vendors typically make money by producing software that people want to use. This is a strong incentive to make it more usable.
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Solutions: Establish more and stronger incentives. For example, annual Free Software design awards could publicize and reward developers for good design.
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Some programmers are also great designers, but most aren’t. Programming and human interface design are separate skills, and people good at both are rare.
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Solutions: Provide highly accessible training materials for programmers, and volunteer designers, to improve the overall level of design competence. Foster communities that let programmers collaborate with usability specialists.
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Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed. 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.
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Solution: Establish a process for usability specialists to contribute to a project.
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Usability is hard to measure. Some qualities of software are easily and precisely measured: whether it runs at all, how fast it starts, how fast it runs, and whether it is technically correct.
So why do programmers respond differently to usability suggestions than to more technical bug reports?
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But these are only partial substitutes for more important qualities that are harder to measure: whether the software is useful, how responsive it feels, whether it behaves as people expect, what proportion of people succeed in using it, how quickly they can use it, and how satisfied they are when they’re finished.
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Solutions: Promote small-scale user testing techniques that are practical for volunteers. Develop and promote screen capture, video recording, and other software that makes tests easier to run.
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Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written.
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But doing all that wireframing and prototyping seems boring, so a programmer often just starts coding — they’ll worry about the interface later.
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But the more code has been written, the harder it is to fix a design problem — so programmers are more likely not to bother, or to convince themselves it isn’t really a problem. And if they finally fix the interface after version 1.0, existing users will have to relearn it, frustrating them and encouraging them to consider competing programs.
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Too many cooks. In the absence of dedicated designers, many contributors to a project try to contribute to human interface design, regardless of how much they know about the subject. And multiple designers leads to inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.
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Chasing tail-lights. In the absence of a definite design of their own, many developers assume that whatever Microsoft or Apple have done is good design. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn’t. In imitating their designs, Free Software developers repeat their mistakes, and ensure that they can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives.
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Solution: Encourage innovative design through awards and other publicity.
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Scratching their own itch. Volunteer developers work on projects and features they are interested in, which usually means software that they are going to use themselves. Being software developers, they’re also power users. So software that’s supposed to be for general use ends up overly geeky and complicated. And features needed more by new or non-technical users — such as parental controls, a setup assistant, or the ability to import settings from competing software — may be neglected or not implemented at all.
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Solutions: Establish a culture of simplicity, by praising restrained design and ridiculing complex design.
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Fifteen pixels of fame. When a volunteer adds a new feature to a popular application, it is understandable for them to want recognition for that change — to be able to point to something in the interface and say “I did that”. Sometimes this results in new options or menu items for things that should really have no extra interface. Conversely, removing confusing or unhelpful features may draw the ire of the programmers who first developed them.
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Solutions: Provide alternative publicity, such as a Weblog, for crediting contributors.
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project communications are mostly plain text, in e-mail, instant messaging, IRC, or a bug tracking system. But interaction design is multi-dimensional, involving the layout and behavior of elements over time, and the organization of those elements in an overall interface.
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Solutions: Develop and promote VoIP, video chat, virtual whiteboard, sketching, and animation software that allows easier communication of design ideas over the Internet.
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KurtUsability is often neglected in open source software--here are good ideas on how to fix it.
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andy broomfield ♽Interaction and usability in open source software
open-source reference design blog interaction programming free-software software development interaction-design gui opinion -fromdelicious
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03 Aug 08
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Angus HongThe best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process it
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Jeff JohnsonWhen I wrote the first version of this article six years ago, I called it “Why Free Software usability tends to suck”. The best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain largely unfixed.
free software poor usability open_source opensource applications
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02 Aug 08
Chee Aun Limvery good points on why I myself don't quite like 'some' Free Software
software design usability development opensource freeware open-source
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