

Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it - dylan
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

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makecheck
This article is somewhat misleading, in that of the 15 things listed, only the
bottom three are identified as unique to free software.

Indeed, some of _the_ most disgustingly unusable stuff I have ever seen has
come from companies, not only Microsoft but "enterprise" people, groups that
should have a vested interest in software quality.

A problem I didn't see listed, is that the people _acquiring_ software may not
care. Many of them absolutely don't. I've been in organizations where the
people in charge of getting stuff don't have a clue what "features" or
misfeatures are actually impacting the usability of the people they are
supposed to serve. They don't ask, they don't factor it into the buy/download
decision, and no one seems to trace the resulting productivity problems back
to them.

~~~
culley
actual work conversation from last week...

me: "Yes, but will this new software reduce the time it takes folks to do
their jobs."

them: "I don't know."

me: "Do you know how long it takes them to do it now?"

them: "umm... no."

you hit the nail on the head in that the people making the buy decisions don't
consider usability.

~~~
akd
You can reduce the time it takes someone to do something, without knowing how
long it takes them to do. That's what I'm working on right now.

If you make everyone's computer 100% faster, you know that you're delivering a
net benefit, even if you're unable to quantify it (it's certainly not 100%).

------
curiousgeorge
>> Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it >> is, at
least roughly, designed before the code is written.

In my experience, software and web development tends to fail when early work
is made with specific UI assumptions in mind. The successful projects I have
been a part of have concentrated on putting basic functionality first, and
then iterating around the usability design and other features.

~~~
mixmax
As an opposing datapoint my experience is the exact opposite.

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orib
I disagree with the premise of the article. On average, Free software seems to
have better usability proprietary applications.

Furthermore, usability is rapidly improving, since developers seem to be
becoming more aware of usability issues in general. Sure, there are examples
of horribly unusable apps, but I find the ones that suck the most are the
proprietary windows apps, even the ones from big companies, and some of the
most usable and consistent apps are open source.

Even so, there is always room for improvement, and the biggest issue is simply
the lack of developer time to implement all the great usability ideas that pop
up.

~~~
stcredzero
"...Free software seems to have better usability..."

Not sure about that. Dia vs. Visio? Visio wins. Maya 3D vs. Blender? Many say
Maya 3D wins. GIMP vs. Photoshop? I'd say that one was really a tie with a
large pool of people just used to the way Photoshop does things. OpenOffice
vs. Word? OpenOffice still has lots of interface snafus compared to Word. (But
AbiWord doesn't have those.)

I contend that Open Source / Free Software almost never achieves the same
level of GUI polish as the best proprietary apps without someone being paid to
do it. The market forces in the volunteer-only situation almost never push it
to that level.

If you contend that Open/Free and Proprietary apps as a whole are around the
same average level, I would generally agree. But let's be honest here: that's
setting the bar way too low. Everyone should be aiming for the top few %. And
when it comes to that, the Proprietary stuff has the lion's share.

------
halo
Rather than creating a large reply, I'd rather put it down to what is the
single biggest problem is that, in my eyes, trumps every single thing in his
essay: Ugly widgets, icons, fonts and badly thought out standardised user
interfaces in both the KDE and, to a lesser extent, GNOME projects.

I think it's obvious why - every application inherits from them and their bad
design decisions result in most applications having the same usability
problems.

NB: The author apparently thinks that making me scroll a hell of a lot is good
for usability - instead I ended up turning off CSS.

------
webwright
Designers are used to a top-down approach. i.e. They create a design (a full-
on design spec with waterfall or a UI improvement/iteration). They like to
have design authority. And, honestly, democratic design is generally pretty
awful.

Devs generally get involved with OSS to make a different and to build
something that THEY want to have (not to serve the the average user). Devs
tend to be the "managers" of OSS projects.

So the big question is: When there is a disagreement about user experience in
an open-source project, who wins? Who has authority? Obviously, you shoot for
consensus, but it often is hard to achieve. Whem you can't achieve consensus
in normal software development, a manager will usually pull rank and say,
"Well, it feels like a design decision. Let's err on the side of going with
our UX designer and the other people who agree with him/her".

I've never done design for an open-source project, but I'd wager that it's
pretty democratic with a strong bias towards what the programmers want (which
often don't jibe with what the designer wants).

