Re: [Usability] Reaching Users

[kerberos piestar net]

Quoting Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:

> On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 09:48 +0000, kerberos piestar net wrote:
> > Quoting Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org>:
> >
> > >> but few can contribute code - which seems to be the sole focus.
> > >
> > > In case you're not aware: Yes, it is a meritocracy. Don't see how this
> > > is a sole problem of Free Software though.
> >
> > No closed source development project I have ever been involved in
> > could ever be described as a meritocracy, unless you consider the
> > ability to pay me as 'merit'.  If a project manager, tester or anyone
> > else doesn't like something I have to fix it - it's not up to me.
> > Even when I have done independant contracts if the customer doesn't
> > like something they generally just withold payment until it's fixed.
> > I simply don't have the option of saying no or ignoring user
> > complaints - and to be honest the software is better for it.
>
> We're not running a company; we're running a community.  The
> methods that work with paid employees don't necessarily work
> with volunteers.  I'm not trying to use volunteerism as an
> excuse, but there are things that just don't work.

I don't disagree.  I just feel that it could be improved and the  
community could be more involved in a two way dialogue than they  
currently are now.  The community seems to be more about support than  
actual contribution and I think that's a shame.

> And I've worked on proprietary software.  It's not always a
> shining example of good usability.  They mess up as often as
> we do.  Very often, market forces push them to check items
> off a feature matrix without giving much thought to usable
> design.

Market forces also cause them to fail as a company or lose money if  
they continue to try to ship software that is hard to use or inferior  
to their competitors.  Such forces don't exist in the FOSS world and  
there lacks the motivation for projects to aggressively compete on  
features and quality.  Gimp is not even at feature parity with  
Photoshop 5.0 and isn't anywhere as usable but is billed as one of the  
'best of breed' apps.

> > > Don't want to be negative, but I guess you have some pet peeve you want
> > > fixed asap and nobody looked at it?
> >
> > My pet peeve is that despite grand gestures and statements the closest
> > that any Linux distro has come to taking usability seriously is
> > talking about a new theme.
>
> That's not at all fair, and it marginalizes all the work done
> by people on this list and throughout Gnome.  Do you really
> believe there have been no usability improvements in the last
> five years?

I don't say that there have been no improvements.  One of the issues I  
see is the 'Walled Garden' of developers vs users, where doing  
something that is 'in' the garden is easy and obvious, but then there  
are large swathes of userland that are 'outside' the garden, and would  
require the user to study for months to achieve tasks on their own  
that would normally be fairly straightforwards.  There is still not a  
'usable by design' ethic that has been present in the Windows and  
Apple developer communities for over a decade.  The garden is getting  
bigger, but it shouldn't exist in the first place.  The approach seems  
to be CLI first, GUI wrapper second.

I suppose it is the distinction between developers and users that  
bothers me.  I am a developer _and_ a user, but I still have no desire  
to spend hours trawling through man pages and howto's to achieve  
simple things - it simply doesn't interest me anymore.  For example  
last time I tried to mount a volume with NTFS-3G (apart from it  
destroying the partition table) the GUI wrapper spat out a huge chunk  
of CLI info as the volume was marked as 'dirty' and there was no  
handling condition for that.  Users are viewed largely as second class  
citizens and there is a visible distinction between 'experienced  
users' and 'noobs', with different tools for each - a distinction that  
doesn't exist on most other platforms.

The beauty of the GUI is you do not need to learn anything to use it -  
anyone can mount a volume in Windows (and I am assuming OSX) provided  
they know roughly what they want to do.  In Linux, which only  
relatively recently got a GUI volume mounter, you have to learn a  
whole bunch of esoteric commands to do so - but this is viewed as the  
'proper' way to do it largely and has never been seen as a bad thing  
(which it is) unless you are the <1% who only have access to the CLI.

> You're being very negative and borderline insulting.  I'm sure
> you mean well, but your methods aren't accomplishing your goals.

I am just trying to be honest.  I think I have a much worse impression  
of it than most people but I represent the 'unhappy users', a large  
but normally silent contingent.  Surely only listening to people who  
already like it and are of the opinion that there is nothing really  
wrong is not a productive use of time?  If I want to find out what is  
really wrong with anything I have made I generally ask the people who  
hate it, which is the point I am trying to get across - the community  
largely consists of people who like it, with the people that don't  
having left long ago.  I don't think that's entirely healthy and that  
efforts should be made to engage those people and find out why.

I am also sorry if you feel offended, I don't mean to be.