Why free software usability tends to suck

[angelos0]

Why free software usability tends to suck

 

 

1. Dedicated volunteer interface designers appear to be much rarer than their paid counterparts ? and where they do exist, they tend to be less experienced (like yours truly).

 

2. First corollary: Every contributor to the project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.

 

3. Second corollary: Even when dedicated interface designers are present, they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects, precisely because they?re dedicated designers and don?t have patches to implement their suggestions.

 

4. Many hackers assume that whatever Microsoft or Apple do is good design, when this is frequently not the case. In imitating the designs of these companies, volunteer projects repeat their mistakes, and ensure that they can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives.

 

5. Volunteers hack on stuff which they are interested in, which usually means stuff which they are going to use themselves. Because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use.

 

6. The converse also applies. Many of the little details which improve the interface ? like focusing the appropriate control when a window is opened, or fine-tuning error messages so that they are both helpful and grammatical ? are not exciting or satisfying to work on, so they get fixed slowly (if at all).

 

7. As in a professional project, in a volunteer project there will be times when the contributors disagree on a design issue. Where contributors are paid to work on something, they have an incentive to carry on even if they disagree with the design. Where volunteers are involved, however, it?s much more likely that the project maintainer will agree to add a user preference for the issue in question, in return for the continued efforts of that contributor. The number, obscurity, and triviality of such preferences ends up confusing ordinary users immensely, while everyone is penalized by the resulting bloat and reduced thoroughness of testing.

 

8. For the same reason ? lack of monetary payment ? many contributors to a volunteer project want to be rewarded with their own fifteen pixels of fame in the interface. This often manifests itself in checkboxes or menu items for features which should be invisible.

 

9. The practice of releasing early, releasing often frequently causes severe damage to the interface. When a feature is incomplete, buggy, or slow, people get used to the incompleteness, or introduce preferences to cope with the bugginess or slowness. Then when the feature is finished, people complain about the completeness or try to retain the preferences. Similarly, when something has an inefficient design, people get used to the inefficiency, and complain when it becomes efficient. As a result, more user preferences get added, making the interface worse.

 

10. A human interface tends to be much better if it is designed before any code has been written (though of course details of the design may be improved later). The desired interface may affect your choice of algorithms, the order in which operations are performed, the use of threading, the format for storing data on disk, and of course the feature set of the program as a whole.

 

But if you?re a programmer, you?re likely to find drawing all those dialog mock-ups and state diagrams to be very boring ? you just want to start coding. And if you?re not being paid to do either the design or the coding, you?ll probably go for the coding first because it?s more interesting.

 

11. Good design is more than skin deep. However, there is a persistent mindset ? present in even some of the smartest contributors to Free Software ? that a bad interface can be fixed merely by skinning it. It ain?t so. Given enough money for testing, you could produce a theme which was measurably more usable than any other, but the most severe problems in an interface are usually completely independent of the theme used. Oblivious to this, volunteer designers go on wild goose chases to produce hundreds of different themes, in the belief that if the interface is pretty enough it will suddenly become usable.

 

12. In a few rare cases, the interface for a program may be obfuscated for no other reason than to keep annoying lusers away. (I haven?t yet seen anyone admit this, but I have seen several cases where horribly confusing interface is advocated for Mozilla under the pretext that Mozilla isn?t for end users.)

 

13. Commercial software often takes advantage of usability testing to find usability problems and compare possible solutions. While it?s possible to do such testing relatively cheaply, it?s still beyond the budget of many volunteer contributors.

 

Whenever this deficiency is mentioned, the Free Software community trumpets the GNOME usability study which was paid for and carried out by Sun Microsystems last year. Unfortunately this study only scratched the surface, producing conclusions which were useful but which would have been fairly obvious to the average HCI graduate doing a heuristic evaluation.

 

In the absence of regular usability testing, volunteer projects rely on feedback from users, but such feedback is often far removed from reality.

 

14. In the Free Software world, modularity is seen as extremely important ? you need to be able to swap out any part of the system in favor of an alternative implementation. This is good for the long-term health of the system, but it does lead to a lack of integration which decreases usability.

 

The obvious example is where your window manager and your application programs use inconsistent fonts, colors, and button styles, because they have separate settings which aren?t synchronized with each other. More fundamentally, environments like GNOME and KDE are at a disadvantage since they try to work with broken window managers, metadataless filesystems, and a large variety of types of keyboard.

 

 

(originally posted at http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/04/13)

 

Is it true, do free software interfaces and usability really suck?Εσεις τι λετε?

[trustfm]

ena matso anohsies ! den stekei tipota apo auta pou anaferei sto site ... Isa isa to anapodo shmbainei ... gia na exei access o opoiosdhpote se ena open source program kanei thn interface oso to dunaton pio compatible . Ta pio dusxrhsta , strifna progs einai shareware.

[random]

Tο "Free Software" ειναι λιγο αόριστο οπως αναφέρεται στο άρθρο.

Υπάρχει open source (μπορείς να δείς τον κώδικα), freeware (μπορείς να χρησιμοποιείσεις το τελικό προϊόν χωρίς χρέωση),

και υπάρχουν 10άδες συνδιασμοί αδειών χρήσης, και δικαιωμάτων πηγαίου κώδικα.

Και εξαρτάται ποιός παράγει των κώδικα, και για τι τάξη μεγέθους μιλάμε. Πληρώνονται ή όχι? (αυτος που γράφει το άρθρο αναφέρει εθελοντές).

 

Άλλο Apache.org, mozilla.org (free, open, volunteers, οργανωμένα πράγματα σαν εταιρεία),

 

άλλο 2 φίλοι που εστησαν μια εφαρμογούλα πελατολόγιο/reminder/calendar/mp3 player se VB και τι διανεμουν δωρεάν μεσω

pathfinder (και αν δινουν μονο exe, ειναι free, αλλα οχι open),

 

άλλο οι IBM, Sun, που δίνουν πάρα πολλά προγράμματα δωρεάν, αλλα οι προγραμματιστές που τα φτιάχνουν δεν ειναι εθελοντές. Ειναι κανονικοί υπάλληλοι, απλά το προιον της εργασίας τους δεν χρεώνεται λογω πολιτικής (αυτοί μπορεί να δινουν και free, και open, αλλα δεν έχεις δικαιωμα να το τροποποιήσεις και να το μεταπουλήσεις σαν δικό σου πρόγραμμα),

 

άλλο το outpost firewall 1.0 που ειναι απλά η light version ενος shareware. δωρεάν μεν, αλλα οχι open. και οχι απο εθελοντές. Προφανώς εχει καποιες δυνατότητες λιγότερες, αλλα το interface ειναι πολυ προσεγμένο γιατι ειναι ο "κραχτης" για την εκδοση pro.

 

Προσωπικά έχω την χειρότερη αποψη για όλα αυτα τα (skinnable ή όχι) media players που κυκλοφορούν free/share. Το αν είναι open δεν με ενδιαφέρει διόλου. Ειμαι developer σε άλλα χωράφια. Για να ακουσω mp3, δεν προκειται να πιάσω c compiler, να διωρθώσω τα bugs του καθε μυστήριου. Αν δεν παίζει, άντε γειά.

Οσα και να κατεβάσεις, έχουνε στρογγυλά/τρίγωνα/οβαλ κουμπιά, πολύχρωμα, τρελές κορνιζες, theme backgrounds (υποθέτω οτι όλος ο κόσμος οταν κανει κλικ στον mp3 player, αυτο που πραγματικά θέλει ειναι να βλέπει μπροστά του μια εικόνα της britney, ενω εγώ ο ανώμαλος είμαι ο μόνος που θέλει να διαβαστουν αρχεια mp3 απο το δίσκο, και να ακουσω μουσική).

Φυσικά ολα αυτα παίζουν μια χαρά οταν χρησιμοποιείς παρόμοιο desktop με τον δημιουργό (800, 1024, 32bit). Δεν έχει ακούσει κανενας τους για αναλύσεις 640,1152,1284.

Τελικά το media player που με κέρδισε ειναι το MP Classic, γιατι πολύ απλά ο δημιουργός του δεν ασχολήθηκε καθόλου με το interface, πήρε το default microsoft media player 6.4, και απλά πρόσθεσε ότι έλειπε απο δυνατότητες και ρυθμίσεις.

 

τελικά δηλαδή, δεν έχει πολύ άδικο στο άρθρο, αλλα γενικεύει.

Απλά αυτά δε ισχύουν για ολα τα ειδη προγραμμάτων, όλες της άδειες, και όλους τους παραγωγούς software, αλλα κατα περίπτωση.