Jakob Nielson on OSS usability:
From a usability standpoint how do you rate open source software compared to proprietary software?Poorly, I’m sorry to say. I think the reason is that it’s biased highly for one specialised area which is the very technical such as IT systems administrators. But Linux for the average user or other open source solutions for someone who is not a geek rates particularly low.
The reason is, the motivation for open source is not because the person gets paid but the person gets prestige. The developers are designing for each other and they are so feature rich--geeks love features--and you get more prestige by adding features. For the average person fewer features is better and easier to understand.
The value systems are kind of opposite for what average users need and what open source developers want to do. As long as they are designing for other people like themselves it works quite well. But as soon as they try and design for the average person it breaks down....
Open source software, in my experience, does suffer from this problem. Firefox is the exception says Michelle Levesque, who has closely studied this problem.
I have five major complaints about Open Source software development, but in advance I would like to clarify two things. First of all, there will always be exceptions to every rule. For example, I believe that relatively few complaints listed here apply to the Open Source browser Firefox which continues to surpass my expectations.
Creating and shipping great user-oriented software is no simple task. You've got to have solid planning, strong leadership, capable engineers, lots and lots of testing, and most important of all, an understanding of the customer. I think that last bit is the hardest for most OSS projects that try to appeal to more than just open source techie types.
Firefox is doing things differently and has been since it's inception. The project began with a small team of talented engineers who put usability above breadth of functionality and who began by saying that just because a feature was free, doesn't mean it necessarily belongs in the product.
Posted by asa at August 23, 2004 11:19 AMI think Neilsen's characterization is unfair. I see it as a knee-jerk reaction by someone who isn't involved with, and really doesn't keep up with, the field he's commenting on. Nielsen is a preeminent expert in his field, however, when he comments on something that is outside his expertise (specifically web design - NOT the usability thereof- and, in this case, OSS) he presumes too much.
The comment was valid for the last generation of open source software, but the newest generation, which I consider to have started about 2 years ago with the release of Gnome 2.0, does not necessarily suffer from featuritis and there is a significant shift in the open source community to make desktop software more usable.
With the maturing and cross-pollination of toolkits and desktops, competition between programs in a genre will increasingly come down to usability. The linux community does not (and perhaps never will) have the HIG worship that the Mac community does, but OSS is leaps and bounds better than it was even a year ago and I don't see any reason that specific communities will not continue to improve the usability of the software they're outputting.
Posted by: grayrest on August 23, 2004 01:25 PMClosed source apps aren't more usable and have tons of feature bloat (to sell the latest version) themselves.
And the rss feed statusbar icon (who the hell needs that?) isn't much better.
Posted by: Doron on August 23, 2004 01:57 PMI know lots of not-so-friendly OSS apps, but the same goes for closed source apps.
Overall, I still feel that OSS software have generally received a bad reputation of poor usability (the designed by hackers for hackers thing, etc), but it seems the gap is closing rather quickly. The entire Mozilla product line is great in that regard, while IE fails miserably in making the browser easy to configure for high security. The worst part is that the defaults are set to rather low security. Things can get much better by disabling ActiveX in it, etc, or only enabling it for selected sites like Windows Update, but who's going through the trouble by digging in security zones and fuzzy worded security settings anyway?
Posted by: Jugalator on August 23, 2004 02:26 PMDoron, I need the RSS feed statusbar icon. Of course, I also need the live bookmarks to show an icon overlay when I haven't visited them, which is why I don't use that feature yet :)
Of course it should be a simple matter to implement unvisited indicators as an extension (which I'll do if nobody adds it before 1.0). Then I can finally get rid of my privately-hacked version of RSS Reader Panel (does Sage work on 0.9+ yet? anything new worth having?)
Posted by: James on August 23, 2004 03:45 PMI know that many apps on both Windows and Linux that I have used have felt unfriendly/unintuitive/insane. Examples:
Closing the progress bar on a file transfer in trillian cancels the transfer. Perhaps this is just a standard behavior I'm unused to, but it seems like I shouldn't have to have it cluttering up the screen. I certainly don't in iChat
The new IBM thinkpad my gf just got converted the whole HD to NTFS when she first booted it up. Why on earth wasn't this done before it shipped? It's just confusing to new users
MS Office X uses visual effects similar to other OSX programs without any real thought of why those effects exist (in this case, the genie effect on the font panel), and it ends up slowing down the program. It's also just amazingly complex and bloated.
Basically I guess I'm trying to say that it's not just the FOSS programs that have bad UIs, it's most programs (less so in the mac world since we're so GUI obsessed, but it still gets pretty ugly sometimes). The customization obsession of many open source projects (Mozilla, emacs, etc...) does lead to some problems though.
Posted by: David Smith on August 23, 2004 04:12 PMJames: Yes, Sage works fine on 0.9+ and is a joy to use.
Asa, I've read the same piece, but... if this is the cause for this recent "remove stuff from firefox", can I at least ask you to be more open to the comments of users? See the outcry over the removal of "View Source" and altSS switcher in the status bar. These things will not be 'confusing' to the users. They're done elegantly and in a minor way.
This theoretical 'average user' won't notice the little icon. If he/she does, he'll click it. Then he/she will click on one of the themes, see that it changes the look of the site, and think "Hey, cool! IE doesn't do this!"
How is this bad or confusing?
Posted by: Pahalial on August 23, 2004 04:14 PMAt one time what he wrote seems certainly to have been true. (I never used the stuff much back then, but I can't imagine OSS has regressed since I really started using it as hobby.) Now, however, I do think there's more focus on the interface among more projects.
A question, tho: was traditional software that much more usable, or was it just viewed as so because it always had the familiar interface everyone had always used? (I have a feeling OSS might have been only slightly worse, at the very least.) OSS has to make a special effort to overcome this built-in hurdle; I have a feeling that it's really starting to overcome that now. It could still be a small ways off before use is common, but I'd see it as at the very least not unusual in five years.
Posted by: Jeff Walden on August 23, 2004 07:34 PMI would like to post my simple observations.
1.) I think OSS desktop enviroments tend to mimic a cross between win3.x and win95 widget sets.
2.) I think the gtk(+) widgets are God awful to look at.
3.) Most, GUI OSS apps I've used and use on a regular basis, tend to have this strange love afair with trying to clone a windows look and feel while also adding extra functionality then making it all 100% themeable.
4.) Most OSS themes look as if a third grader made them, but I doubt I could do any better since im not a graphic artist. Software developers should make the default theme look appealing.
All apps have bloat, however OSS bloat tends to side on pet projects and peves. Personally I have ZERO-NADA use for the RSS feed widget in Firefox, and for a less extent the theme manager, I use view-source daily yet view-souce will one day become and add-on. Irronic. I would tend to say thats fine since most people outside of select sub groups ever use view-source. But if you head down that road the RSS feed stuff should be an extention, as should the theme manager. Most people will never use RSS feeds, and the same ma and pop firefox user who never needs view-source most likely will never want or need to change themes.
So yes usability is an sore spot on the OSS relm. Developer's pet projects always find an in, which they should as they are developing the software for their use after all. However, when changes are handed down for the greater good pet projects should fall under the same microscope as the rest.
Bar keep pour me another round.
Posted by: Samual Icky on August 23, 2004 08:48 PMCan you please fix up your CSS, it appears unstyled in Opera and both alternate stylesheets look hideous. I like this blog because it's interesting and updated often but I can't stand to read it like this.
Posted by: Luke Shingles on August 23, 2004 09:46 PMOne of the IE team mentions why he feels a lot safer using IE than Firefox (or other browsers):
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmassy/archive/2004/07/23/193727.aspx
Well I, for one, found it amusing :)
Some interesting comments too.
Posted by: Dave on August 24, 2004 09:57 AMAsa, it looks like on the main page, your CSS isn't working. I have firefox installed.
Posted by: Mike Wills on August 24, 2004 10:35 AMCorrection... fix the CSS so that "basic" isn't the default.
Posted by: Mike Wills on August 24, 2004 10:36 AM"The css2 support is incomplete and buggy (just browse bugzilla).
This feature isn't ready for prime time, doesn't offer a significant benefit to
the user wich is anyway accustumed to css1-half-compliant browsers, and fails to
even match the basic design possibilities offered by in-content pictures
[...]
You should pull css2 support of [immediately] and if one can make it work better
then add it back in twenty years."
I just read that... I have never had problems with CSS switcher.
Posted by: Mike Wills on August 24, 2004 02:15 PMIn my view Work Offline IS buggy enough that it is better to remove it for 1.0. On the other hand I have never had problems with the CSS switcher and am very disappointed to lose it.
Posted by: Tom Judd on August 24, 2004 02:26 PMThe best FF version is 0.8.
Posted by: AJ on August 25, 2004 12:02 AMAJ, I have to respectfully disagree with you. I can't think of a single thing which was better in 0.8 but several things which were worse (managing extensions, JS options, default theme etc).
I understand, and agree with, the developers wish to remove half-finished features which would delay the release of 1.0 too much if they had to be fixed.
That being said, I hope AltCSS will not be removed. It's small, unobtrusive, and performs vital functions. I never noticed the bugs in it, and looking them over it seems like most of them are more RFEs than real bugs. The bottom line is that the AltCSS switcher does not do all it should do, but it's not "broken" in any way. That in combination with the fact that it really is unobtrusive is enough to convince me that it should stay.
That's the way I see things.