Monday, March 01, 2004

Eric Raymond involved in yet another controversy

This time, however, he's right. Go figure.

ESR: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story: "GUI tools and voluminous manuals are not enough. You have to think about what the actual user experiences when he or she sits down to do actual stuff, and you have to think about it from the user's point of view. The CUPS people, despite good intentions, have utterly failed at this. I'm going to anatomize this failure in detail, because there are lessons here that other open-source projects would do well to heed. The point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS people — it's also to beat up on every other open-source designer who does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI."

Iraqi LUG: The Current Interfaces Have No Future: "Raymond is taking Microsoft as a direction example that the Open Source community could follow. Quote: 'This kind of fecklessness (poor UI usability and design) is endemic in open-source land. And it's what's keeping Microsoft in business — because by Goddess, they may write crappy insecure overpriced shoddy software, but on this one issue their half-assed semi-competent best is an order of magnitude better than we [in the open source world] usually manage' ... The Open Source community could better embrace psychologists for future development of interfaces and increasing the human efficiency instead of following 20 years old interface standards."

ESR: The Luxury of Ignorance: Part Deux: "The most valuable gift you can give your users is the luxury of ignorance — software that works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice users, that they don't have to read documentation or spend time and mental effort to learn about it."

Frankly, that's advice Apple should heed. It's OS X system is "beautiful looking" but not "easy to use" because Apple cares about aesthetics over ease of use. It's one area where XP kicks OS X's butt, as I've often argued, because Apple still employs a 20-year-old desktop interface, while Microsoft is pushing a discoverable, task-centric interface that helps people complete unfamiliar tasks.

[ Posted at 5:32 PM | Permalink ]

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Monday, March 01, 2004

Eric Raymond involved in yet another controversy

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