
Why free software has poor usability, and how to improve it - cheeaun
http://www.mpt.net.nz/2012/06/why-free-software-has-poor-usability/
======
wpietri
I liked the title, but absolutely hate this article.

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.

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.

~~~
aidenn0
So many places to criticize the article, but the one that hit me the most was
"Release Early, Release Often" being held up as counter to usability. My
experience is the exact opposite; it's not until you've released that you
actually know how people will use your product and often too much UX design
up-front is just premature optimization.

~~~
jiggy2011
That's true, but then you have to follow up with users and take careful notes.

The impression I get with many open source projects is that they just push out
updates in a vacuum and aren't so interested in "regular" users feedback
beyond bug reports and patches.

~~~
wpietri
Some aren't interested, I'm sure. But I think this is one area were better
tools could help a lot.

Getting good usage data is hard. Running a good user test is harder. It's my
experience that if you connect developers up with good data, both qualitative
and quantitative, many of them will start hacking the user experience with the
same sort of relentless optimization that they bring to code quality and
system performance.

I think there has to be a good solution in there somewhere. Maybe several.

------
johanbev
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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
ams6110
_for whom is the usability measured_

I think this is critical. A software product like Emacs would never have been
produced as a consumer product for sale by a vendor. Emacs is the way it is
because it was developed by and for the people who used it: coders. Not all
"free" software is targeted at nor should it necessarily be usable by your mom
(not a dig at your mom).

(From the article) _Free software developers mostly develop software based on
their own requirement and their definition of “good software”, and as a
result, design software that is very complicated and “geeky”._

In many cases, this is as it should be, unless they are developing something
specifically targeted at users from the "general public." However, where I do
think some projects go off the rails is when they develop a UI that is either
internally inconsistent, or so non-standard that even technically-minded users
are frustrated by it.

------
gouranga
Sorry for the rant but posts like this piss me right off.

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.

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.

~~~
lazerwalker
> 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.

A flaw of many open source software projects is that they tend to be
inhospitable to designers coming in and attempting to contribute in a
meaningful manner. Usability shouldn't just mean "dumbing things down", no,
but if a program is well-designed then improving its accessibility to
newcomers need not be at odds with elegant and efficient operation for more
advanced users.

There are many projects where attempting to submit a patch that improved
usability would be met on deaf ears, even if it was a change that solved a
legitimate design problem or improved on a current solution, because the
maintainers of the project have a mindset of "the design works for me,
therefore it works for everyone". In this case, "fixing the problem" doesn't
mean actively contributing to an open source project (since that in itself is
the problem), it means attempting to change the approach people take to
managing open source projects.

This article in particular is a messy jumble of ineffectual buzzwords, but
there is a small nugget of truth buried in there.

~~~
gouranga
Open source projects are inhospitable to designers because they come in and
arrogantly blast their opinion into an establishment. The establishment knows
its userbase better than a designer will.

The designers then crawl off and blog whinge about it.

Open source doesn't work the same as 'business' where change drives sales.
That's the misunderstanding.

~~~
joelanman
Wow - a very 'us and them', aggressive attitude you've got there.

It's clear that for any app, site or OS to have mainstream success, it needs
to have a well-designed interface, a good user experience. Apple, Google and
others have all invested heavily here, and the big winners all have interfaces
that are easy for a non-technical user to use.

If open source projects want to gain mainstream usage, they also need to
invest in usability, and like any skill, there are people who have more
ability and more experience. As these people are not necessarily programmers,
it can be hard for them to contribute to open source processes that are
centred around code contribution.

~~~
gouranga
You miss the point: success in the traditional form at least is 100%
irrelevant.

Consider Linux, tex, emacs, vim, apache, mutt, x, postfix.

All successful, yet no traditional form of usability.

~~~
aidenn0
Many of these are _very_ usable for their target audience:

Vim: adds such user-friendly features as syntax highlighting and WIMP while
keeping an interface (vi) that is already well known to it's users, thus
preventing them from having to learn a new set of commands from scratch

Emacs: Clearly the most programmable text-editor currently used. The ease of
usability for extending it is the reason it is adopted.

mutt: synthesized interface from several already existing mail clients, most
notably pine and elm

Apache: If you consider the user to be web developers, it (NCSA HTTPd which is
what Apache grew out of) introduced CGI, which was a huge usability step for
making dynamic web-pages.

Linux: Not sure. It's essentially a clone of SVR4; probably just the fact that
among it's always had the best driver-support on commodity hardware is the win
here.

Postfix: It's more usable than sendmail; not really a glowing review though.

X: Yeah, I can't think of a single good thing to say about X. I've heard that
Motif was the "killer app" for it that kept it around, but I wasn't there so
not sure.

------
mistercow
>Over the past few years, usability of free software has improved slightly.

 _Slightly_? 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.

------
raverbashing
Really

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

Gnome is "usability" gone wild. Remove the steering wheel and pedals from the
car so to make it "simpler". Good luck driving it anywhere

(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)

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.

------
niels_olson
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.

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?

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> They are as indifferent to the OS as we are to the vagaries of navigating
various websites._

Very cool, I've been wondering if and when this would happen. Modern OS's seem
less and less different to younger and younger people.

Only picky techies and older generations seem to care about the differences
these days, kids just dive right in and adapt.

Hopefully that trend continues, it's great for underdogs like FOSS.

------
lomegor
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).

~~~
jamesaguilar
The proposition "software X has comparatively bad usability" is expensive to
provide additional evidence for. The existing evidence includes the typical
experience of people new to FOSS using things like Emacs, VIM, Gnome or GIMP,
a difficult-to-explain preference for proprietary software among professionals
in various fields and among typical consumers, each person's individual
experience, various critical analyses of free software by usability experts
studying the problem, and sundry other evidence. If this isn't enough to
convince you that free software broadly has comparatively poor usability, the
odds of discovering additional evidence that would convince you is probably
too slim to be worth the effort. But it's a premise many of us accept. For
those among us who do, blog posts like this provide some insight.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_The existing evidence includes the typical experience of people new to FOSS
using things like Emacs, VIM, Gnome or GIMP..._

Bad usability and a high learning curve are not the same thing. A high
learning curve is what makes people "new to FOSS" have difficulty with
emacs/vim, not a lack of usability.

And Gnome is also a bad example, since it is both usable and has a minimal
learning curve. At my last job we set up a crowd of 30 fashionistas (no tech
background whatsoever) using gnome with no real issues. Several of them also
used inkscape with little difficulty.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Try to change font faces or default frame parameters on Emacs. You could
describe that catastrophe as a high learning curve, but I think it's a
usability problem. This is just one example.

------
powertower
It was a good read, but it might as well have been titled: Why Afghanistan has
poor Democracy uptake, and how to improve that.

Basically, the author says, "update" the process that's responsible for the
open-source world, into a more methodological corporate environment.

He doesn't realize it's a completly different world. In which the mentioned
"fixes" are contradictory to it's sprit.

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".

------
codexon
This could be summed up in a single sentence.

Usability takes more time and effort, and authors of hard to use free software
find the usability to be good enough for themselves.

------
ExpiredLink
If you think 'free software has poor usability' you've never tried commercial
software.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Replace "commercial" with "enterprise" and I agree completely. Amazing how bad
software that costs _so_ much can be!

(side note: I might have accidentally down-voted you as my hand brushed over
the screen. If so, I apologize and hopefully someone will give you an up-vote
for me to replace it.)

------
jblock
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.

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.

------
statictype
Interestingly, his older and popular (and I felt much better written) article
on free software usability ( <http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-
software-usability> ) seems to redirect to this one.

~~~
hoppipolla
It seems that the "mpt" who owns that domain today and is responsible for this
article is not the same as the "mpt" that wrote the original article [1].

[1] <https://twitter.com/mpt/status/209033178705436672>

~~~
statictype
Wow. That's kind of shady isn't it (for the new owner to write a similar
article and then redirect the older one to the newer one)?

------
pubby
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:

> 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.

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.

------
TelmoMenezes
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?

------
naner
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:

"This is What Real Analysis Looks Like"

[http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-
looks-...](http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-like/)

------
richcollins
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.

------
technel
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!

------
agilebyte
For anyone thinking they can improve open source software's usability, donate
your time here: <http://openusability.org/>.

Mind you the project's goal is to make OSS usable by 'common computer users'.

------
motters
A pretty worthless article which makes a lot of false assumptions about the
nature of free software.

