On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Lennart Borgman wrote: > Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 03:32:00 +0100 > From: Lennart Borgman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Usability] Special Open Source Issue of Interactions > Magazine > > Hi Jonathan, > > I am not going to contribute because I am not an expert in this area.
When did anyone in open source* ever let that stop them? ;) You can learn a lot from a few good books. One of the biggest tricks in open source development is breaking down the problem into smaller pieces. The Human Interface Guidelines have been essential in allowing users to express to developers how much they really do care about usability, and consistency in particular. The buzzword here might be heuristic analysis, because with a few general rules you can get a lot done. The bigger holistic analysis requires a much deeper understanding of a project and the tasks being solved and although these problems cannot be so easily broken up and tackled by many people they can be tackled by a few serious designers with enough time. (Also paper prototyping or making mockups using RAD tools and small surveys can go a long way, huge resources not required.) > But could you please also look at accessibility at the same time. > Accessibility is difficult and it seems to me that it often get > overriden by some personal usability style. This is very unfortunate. I've found that good usability means you end up learning a lot about accessibility, and a bit of everything else actually. Understand the constraints and be able to justify the trade-offs and then you can at least say the usability is good for your target audience. We really are aiming for mass market, the best answer for the most people possible so the last thing we would want is to intentionally exlcude users. Understanding accessibility (a11y) helps you justify a lot decisions and things to avoid like the careful use of colour and texture. Working on documentation teaches you the importance writing style, and interenationalisation teaches you more about your own language. Both of these are reasons why avoiding acronyms is something I always make a point about (I should explained above that RAD stands for Rapid Application Development, and URL is never as clear as saying link or location or address or whatever is most appropriate for the situation and actually translatable. Also the space constraints of translatable strings mean that trying to be excessively terse in English is akin to a premature optimisation.) If you care about accessibility it often helps if you can turn it back around into a techincal discussion which developers will be more interested in hearing. If you can make your system work for a pointer you can make it work well for pen driven devices too (so many portable devices, but multimedia and artists too). Dont talk to me about right click. > Microsoft has been a proponent for accessibility and sometimes they have > listen well and done it good. Now I am sitting here with XP (I need it, > unfortunately and my latest test of GNU/Linux led to a reinstall of > everything - those small little details...). What I see is that > Microsoft has recently done the same mistake. The latest Windows Media > Player is more good looking than accessible. Bah! Why do they hire that > kind of kids that can't keep enough details in their head to do both > things - both a nice and accessible GUI. The aren't the only ones who dont use the standard widgets, witness the frequent reinvention of skinning and themes. Microsoft ends up competing against itself with the Office team coming up with whole new widgets every major release and making things inconsistent again. Apple try to keep things together but some of their products jump ahead with new and unusual widget stylings. > Well, that is the story in my opinion. It seems like when things gets > complicated then accessibility is forgotten. It simply makes it simpler. > > That is my belief of course. That the developers or perhaps rather the > managers are not good enough. It could be worse. It could be that they > do not care. It could be that the time lines are so short that they do > not care about accessibility. And that is worse! > > Antoher of my favorites when it comes to usability is my frustration > about the continous wheel inventing. One time when I installed GNU/Linux > everything went very, very fine -- until I should login and start using > it. I had no mouse on that system. I tried Ctrl-Esc, the Window Keys, > Ctrl-Alt-Del and everything else I learned from my MS Windows > experience. Nothing of it worked. Funny you should mention that because if I recall correctly one of the stated reasons for not copying those keybindings is *accessibility* or more specifically predictability. [1] Gnome uses Alt+F1 for the main menu Alt+F2 for the run dialog ... There was a discussion recently about how we might make it easier for users who wanted to quickly setup those keybindings and use the Super key (aka Windows key) in the ways they already learnt but as far as I know no one is following up on that. (Incidentally Ctrl+Esc used to work way back when there was just one panel and the Gnome main menu was in the bottom left corner.) > to let the user use their experience. Even if they have experiences from > the big EVIL MS. Do not bannish the users for their experience. That is > just not the way forward! Given the majority of existing users are familiar with Microsoft technologies I certainly favour an embrace and extend approach but that is easier siad than done. Ideally though it is projects like OLPC targetting the even bigger audience of totally new users which have the potential to make revolutionary changes. -- Alan * Open Source and Freedom Software et cetera ... [1] vaguely relevant links http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2006-November/msg00013.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2006-October/msg00009.html http://www.gnome.org/learn/access-guide/latest/keynav-1.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2006-August/msg00023.html _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
