Related to my yesterday rant about QGIS and usability: I’ve been reading an article called “Usability and Open Source Software” article and it has a lot of interesting points. It’s a little bit dated (year 2002), but I think most issues remain the same even now after 10 years.
Here are some highlights I find interesting (but you should read the whole article):
If this [desktop and application design] were primarily a technical problem, the outcome would hardly be in doubt. But it isn’t; it’s a problem in ergonomic design and interface psychology, and hackers have historically been poor at it. That is, while hackers can be very good at designing interfaces for other hackers, they tend to be poor at modeling the thought processes of the other 95% of the population well enough to write interfaces that J. Random End-User and his Aunt Tillie will pay to buy. (Raymond, 1999)
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The ‘personal itch’ motivation creates a significant difference between open source and commercial software development. Commercial systems development is usually about solving the needs of another group of users. The incentive is to make money by selling software to customers, often customers who are prepared to pay precisely because they do not have the development skills themselves. Capturing the requirements of software for such customers is acknowledged as a difficult problem in software engineering and consequently techniques have been developed to attempt to address it. By contrast, many OSS projects lack formal requirements capture processes and even formal specifications (Scacchi, 2002). Instead they rely on understood requirements of initially individuals or tight-knit communities.
The relation to usability is that this implies that OSS is in certain ironic ways more egotistical than closed source software (CSS). A personal itch implies designing software for one’s own needs. Explicit requirements are consequently less necessary. Within OSS this is then shared with a like-minded community and the individual tool is refined and improved for the benefit of all – within that community. By contrast, a CSS project may be designing for use by a community with different characteristics.
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Many kinds of commercial software have been criticised for its bloated code, consuming ever greater amounts of memory and processor cycles with successive software version releases. There is a commercial pressure to increase functionality and so to entice existing owners to purchase the latest upgrade. … There are similar pressures in open source development, but due to different causes. Given the interests and incentives of developers, there is a strong incentive to add functionality and almost no incentive to delete functionality, especially as this can irritate the person who developed the functionality in question.
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The process of ‘release early and release often’ can lead to an acceptance of certain clumsy features. People invest time and effort in learning them and create their own workarounds to cope with them. When a new, improved version is released with a better interface, there is a temptation for those early adopters of the application to refuse to adapt to the new interface. Even if it is easier to learn and use than the old one, their learning of the old version is now a sunk investment and understandably they may be unwilling to relearn and modify their workarounds.
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‘Software bloat’ is widely agreed to be a negative attribute. However, the decision to add multiple alternative options to a system may be seen as a positive good rather than an invidious compromise. We speculate that freedom of choice may be considered a desirable attribute (even a design aesthetic) by many OSS developers. The end result is an application that has many configuration options, allowing very sophisticated tailoring by expert users, but which can be bewildering to a novice (Nielsen, 1993, p. 12). The provision of five different desktop clocks in GNOME (Smith et al., 2001) is one manifestation of this tendency; another is the growth of preferences interfaces in many OSS programs (Thomas, 2002).
Thus there is a tendency for OSS applications to grow in complexity, reducing their usability for novices, but with that tendency to remain invisible to the developers who are not novices and relish the power of sophisticated applications. Expert developers will also rarely encounter the default settings of a multiplicity of options and so are unlikely to give much attention to their careful selection, whereas novices will often live with those defaults.
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lewesde reblogged this from braincrunch
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