Re: [Usability] Reaching Users

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 17:35 +0000, kerberos piestar net wrote:
[...]
> 
> 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.

In general this turns out to be an oversimplification (of course).

First, the more you charge for software, the harder to use people
will *expect* it to be. And of course, the closer to "mainstream",
the closer to non-technical users who are the majority of the
population of the planet, the easier to use software must be.

Second, marketing and strategic alliances count for a lot more than
many people realise (especially in the Free and Open Source worlds).
Most successful software companies have spent at least half of their
budgets on marketing.

There is no strong correlation between engineering quality and
widespread use.

People don't actually need features - techies *want* features (and
neat features help product reviewers, so they are important); people
need functionality, not features.


You should also realise that there have been significant changes
in the Gnome platform as a direct result of professional useability
work involving real, live, actual, human users. A lot of it.  This is
a large part of why Gnome's focus changed a few years ago from (e.g. in
Gnome 1.4) being neat and highly configurable with a gazillion features,
to being useable by as wide a range of people as possible.

I do agree with you that man pages are not end user documentation,
though, and that some of the tools are not as mature as one would
like.  Of course, admin tool maturity varies, the older and more
mature  Linux distributions like Fedora and Mandriva may have more
solid GUI-based tools than some of the newer distributions.

A more useful approach might be, not "you guys have been doing nothing
and Linux sucks and it's your fault" but, "how can we identify things
to improve, and work on them together?" or, "How can I help with this
project to improve things that has already made such a big difference."

Best,

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org