I liked the title, but absolutely hate this article.<p>A lot of the "solutions" are useless exhortations for other people to be more betterer. Hint: nobody really cares how the peanut gallery thinks they should be spending their free time.<p>The whole thing has a phasist orientation. Ah, the "designing stage". That's the three months of the open-source waterfall where the open-source business analysts gather requirements from the open-source stakeholders before handing over the open-source PRD to the open-source developers, right? As if.
While the author talks about free software in general, it seems more to me that he really means Ubuntu and Unity and perhaps common desktop applications found in that "ecosystem". What's the usability of bash? GCC? Emacs? And perhaps more importantly, for whom is the usability measured? The linux-ecosystem is mostly used by programmers. It's natural that the user interfaces tend to reflect this. One of the main reasons i have linux on my computers is exactly this, I really don't want the user interfaces of Windows or OS X.<p>Problems and solutions are described, but exactly _how_ to implement these solutions isn't stated very clearly, and I'd hesitate to call these suggestions "solutions" because, to be brutally honest, it's all empty talk.<p>Furthermore I feel like many of these solutions come at odds with the foss-culture in general. If I'm giving away my time and code for free, I really don't want a project manager or a designer to tell me what to do. I'm going to do what feels interesting, or I'm going to implement features that I need. If someone else can use my code too, then that's great. If not then that's ok too. To me it's strictly hobby basis. I don't get wages, and I don't have "customers". I'll contribute because it's fun or because I want to honor the idea that I should contribute back changes and improvements I've made to software that I got for free.<p>Of course, this could be very different if I were employed and paid to make software that coincidentally also was free, but I'm not. Maybe this blog post was aimed at Canonical and their employees, or the practices of big projects like GNOME. If so, then maybe he could have the decency to say so, instead of going about "solving" other peoples problems that aren't really there.
Sorry for the rant but posts like this piss me right off.<p>Usability seems to mean low entry barrier and pretty looking these days rather than functionally elegant, normalised and reusable. Usability now means giving dumb people pretty looking things and not bothering to write a manual or relying on their understanding of the domain or having any compromises between the machine and the meat sack using it.<p>Also stop blogging and fix it if it's a problem - that's the joy of open source. If they don't want the 'fix', then its not a fix for the supposed problem or the problem didn't exist to start with.
>Over the past few years, usability of free software has improved slightly.<p><i>Slightly</i>? It has improved by leaps and bounds. I just switched from Mac OS X to using Ubuntu almost exclusively, and aside from a few bumps here and there, I have been very happy with it. That's a plunge I wouldn't have even considered three years ago.
Really<p>The problem in free software is that 1) engineers don't have the needed mindset 2) resources are limited, of course 3) the developer usually does whatever is in his mind<p>Gnome is "usability" gone wild. Remove the steering wheel and pedals from the car so to make it "simpler". Good luck driving it anywhere<p>(Really, from my experience with Fedora 16, out of the box experience at first it's bad, then it gets worse when you see all the little details gone wrong)<p>And to help matters, they think PulseAudio is a good idea. PA is a broken answer in need of a response, really. And it definitely affects user experience.
My kids use Ubuntu, OS X, iOS, Android, and at school they even have Windows. They are as indifferent to the OS as we are to the vagaries of navigating various websites. They use Spotify and Chrome and play their Humble Bundle games. They are 7 and 10 and totally grok accessing an NFS filesystem over wireless and understand that if they can't access their music, it's probably because the wi-fi isn't connected.<p>One thing this does point out, though it might be a bit antithetical to many OSS devs, are there any open source usage stats packages that developers can build into their systems? Like Chrome uses?
Hmm... although I agree with many of the points I think it starts with a bad premise. First you have to prove that free software has poor usability, then you can try to understand it. Most of the free software I use has great usability in my opinion (except for GIMP), although some of them only have good usability for their target markets (e.g. zsh or bash).
It was a good read, but it might as well have been titled: Why Afghanistan has poor Democracy uptake, and how to improve that.<p>Basically, the author says, "update" the process that's responsible for the open-source world, into a more methodological corporate environment.<p>He doesn't realize it's a completly different world. In which the mentioned "fixes" are contradictory to it's sprit.<p>Developers want to spend 100% of their time just hacking away. They are not going to transform that into a 10% dev time and 90% "sit there doing UI and feedback studies, and nurture-the-community time".
This could be summed up in a single sentence.<p>Usability takes more time and effort, and authors of hard to use free software find the usability to be good enough for themselves.
The author is oversimplifying a problem that should not be oversimplified. Usability is something that requires specific empirical evidence to examine, and no two pieces of software are alike. It's a metric that is perpetually evolving and incredibly complicated. It's not just good visual design, and it's not just a symptom of strict coding and architecture standards.<p>The author does not provide much evidence for these solutions combating usability problems, but if they did, I would be much more willing to listen to their advice. I would have also liked to see specific examples of usability faults (not just software with poor aesthetics, which is another subjective metric that the author oversimplifies) and instances where these applied techniques were able to solve them. I commend the author's desire to face-off against a problem which is out there and prevalent in the FOSS world, but their claims need to be backed up before I could take them to heart.
Interestingly, his older and popular (and I felt much better written) article on free software usability ( <a href="http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability" rel="nofollow">http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability</a> ) seems to redirect to this one.
The term 'designer' is extremely vague and I have no idea what the author is referring to each time he uses it in the article. At first I thought he was using it as a nonsense umbrella term (similar to how words like 'scale' are used) but a few paragraphs later he says this:<p>> Similarly, there are only a few coders who are also good designers, but that is very rare because programming and human interface design is very special skills that each requires separate training and a different mindset.<p>Oh, so by design he means 'human interface design'. Yeah, no. Design is much more than just that - it is an umbrella term after all.
Free software has been spectacularly successful at building significant parts of our current computing infrastructure: kernels, compilers, web servers, languages and so on. Many of the products that the author would consider as having good usability are a thin layer built on top of millions of man-hours of open source stuff. So maybe free software is not that good at generating interfaces for the masses. So what? Many of the solutions that the author points out translate into boring work. Why would we expect people to do boring work for free? How could that model ever be sustainable?
Perhaps this was a well-intentioned gesture, but it was carried out poorly. This reminded me of a great article on how to provide thoughtful and useful analysis. Perhaps read that instead:<p>"This is What Real Analysis Looks Like"<p><a href="http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-like/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...</a>
It's much simpler than that. Free software is usually created to be used by the creator, so there is no incentive to make it intelligible to others. The author is correct about incentives but the best incentive is payment for the software. At that point it's no longer free.
I agree that traditionally the OSS community is not very welcoming to designers. I'd be interested in creating a website that engages designers and provides a platform for them to propose visual updates to existing free software. Is anyone else interested in this? Email me!
For anyone thinking they can improve open source software's usability, donate your time here: <a href="http://openusability.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openusability.org/</a>.<p>Mind you the project's goal is to make OSS usable by 'common computer users'.