Re: [Usability] Overthinking things.

[Diego Moya <turingt gmail com>]

2009/12/10  <kerberos:
> I don't see how using such a system for usability complaints could ever
> possibly work, as they will always take a lower priority to bugs, and I
> don't think we'll ever see a situation where bugs will all be fixed.

The "one-hundred papercuts" project by the Ubuntu crew did the
opposite, and explicitly prioritized usability bugs. Several of them
were reported in the user forums, and many others were existing bugs
that got reassigned to that project.  They mostly reached their target
for the Karmik release.


> Plus usability bugs are highly subjective, most developers largely do not
> understand the problems, and it is unable to handle anything big picture,
> only minor issues.
Stumbling blocks in someone's workflow are nothing but objective, and
quite scientifically measurable. *Solutions* to bugs may be
subjective, and it's true that developers typically aren't good at
targeting usability problems. That's why there are open source
iniciatives for usability, that bring together designers and some
other usability people together with developers.

I agree the OSS has a lot work to do to enhance its usability, but it
also has made enormous progress since Mandriva took the lead in the
late 90's to create a user-friendly distro. Plus product-centered
"heuristic evaluations" (for Amarok, the printer system, etc) can
solve some more wide problems than bug reports. And several projects
since Firefox and Gnome have taken a more usability-aware goal, so
they at least try to educate their developers in the ways of the
Human-Computer Interaction.

So I don't see the big picture as bad as you imply. The usability
techniques are slowly permeating the programming tradition, and at
least most developers are now more aware that programming for other
users will need a different design than programming for oneself.
Dismissive remarks about "easy to use" are now less common in
technical forums.