[TriLUG] User Friendliness

[William Sutton]

I'm going to have to wade in here on this one....

Number one, while I use Gimp a lot (ok, exclusively right now since I gave 
away my old copy of Paint Shop Pro), and while I'm quite accomplished with 
it (see trilug.org/~william or free.house.cx/~william), IMVHO it is (and 
has always been) a pain to use.  Try doing nice features like cut out text 
or beveled surfaces for example.

In order to do anything productive with Gimp, you have to know everything 
the program can do, and a lot of things it can't (want to make everything 
around an object transparent?  I hope you have a few hours available...)

Number two, the people doing the engineering on something usually aren't 
the best at designing interfaces.  If it was up to some of the more 
hard-core *nix geeks, we'd all be using sh and ed.  The differences in 
Gnome, KDE, Windows, and Mac that were discussed ad nauseum on this thread 
some months ago are more than enough evidence.

Now, from a certain perspective in UI, you can never design a perfect 
interface.  I had a professor who would tell us, "I don't know what the 
right design is, but that isn't it."--and for good reason.  No matter how 
well you understand the system, there will be someone who finds the 
interface confusing, or who attempts to use it in ways it wasn't intended.

I wish everyone who designed something had a powerful, easy to use 
interface for it, but the fact of the matter is that that's an 
impossibility.

William

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Mike M wrote:

> This response grew beyond its original intended scope.  Apologies
> for this expansion without appropriate earlier quotations.
> 
> On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 07:20:16AM -0400, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
> > 
> > Part of the problem, IMHO, is that FOSS is usually lead by programmers, 
> > who are more often than not lousy at UI design.  There is a natural 
> > resistance to non-programmers giving any sort of direction in application 
> > design.  This is one of the major downsides to the Open Source development 
> > model.
> 
> I am going to support the engineer's interfaces.  For the most part,
> UI designed by engineers are pretty good.  There are stunning examples
> of failures in all fields of engineering, of course, but these are
> few in comparison to the successes.  The "fancy" designers are
> responsible for the attack on engineer's UI skills.  These designers
> were not even part of the equation until engineers gave them tools
> with which to ply their trade.
> 
> Many of the CLI interfaces designed by engineers are elegant.  They
> are not meant for the sheep.
> 
> Windows is diminished by having a poorly maintained and weak CLI.
> 
> GUIs are terrible for the algebra of expression.  You can't easily write
> macros to link programs from different vendors having different GUIs.
> GUI as Good Design is overly used.
> 
> As for the allegation that engineers are opposed to implementing user
> feedback on UI, I say that unless the feedback is part of a well-funded
> study of a market segment, the engineer will never succeed in deflecting
> this attack.  There are too many disparate and ever-changing feedback
> comments to incorporate coherently.
> 
> I think the goal of User Friendliness would be advanced more through 
> a program that allows vendors to certify platforms and peripherals
> against a stable Linux benchmark.  Imagine your plight as a digital 
> camera vendor having just completed work on Linux 2.4 when you learn
> that the 2.6 kernel significanlty changes the way device drivers
> interact with the kernel.  Microsoft understands this situation and 
> give vendors a stable target to shoot at.  If the FOSS community
> created and committed to a stable device interface model, it would
> be easier to use Linux with cameras, printers, scanners, music, video,
> voice comms, etc.
> 
> I think live-CD distros succeed because they draw a line in the
> sand and declare their line to be the benchmark. Then they engineer
> solutions to adapting to many platforms and peripherals.  Things
> Just Work.  It irritates the purists, but they have a different
> agenda.  To me, it seems, the live-CD is the epitome of User Friendly.
> What more could you want, I wonder?
>