2009/12/10 <kerberos: > I don't see how using such a system for usability complaints could ever > possibly work, as they will always take a lower priority to bugs, and I > don't think we'll ever see a situation where bugs will all be fixed.
The "one-hundred papercuts" project by the Ubuntu crew did the opposite, and explicitly prioritized usability bugs. Several of them were reported in the user forums, and many others were existing bugs that got reassigned to that project. They mostly reached their target for the Karmik release. > Plus usability bugs are highly subjective, most developers largely do not > understand the problems, and it is unable to handle anything big picture, > only minor issues. Stumbling blocks in someone's workflow are nothing but objective, and quite scientifically measurable. *Solutions* to bugs may be subjective, and it's true that developers typically aren't good at targeting usability problems. That's why there are open source iniciatives for usability, that bring together designers and some other usability people together with developers. I agree the OSS has a lot work to do to enhance its usability, but it also has made enormous progress since Mandriva took the lead in the late 90's to create a user-friendly distro. Plus product-centered "heuristic evaluations" (for Amarok, the printer system, etc) can solve some more wide problems than bug reports. And several projects since Firefox and Gnome have taken a more usability-aware goal, so they at least try to educate their developers in the ways of the Human-Computer Interaction. So I don't see the big picture as bad as you imply. The usability techniques are slowly permeating the programming tradition, and at least most developers are now more aware that programming for other users will need a different design than programming for oneself. Dismissive remarks about "easy to use" are now less common in technical forums. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
