Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software

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Posted by Amazon on October 24, 2007 at 11:36pm

http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/10/05/make_oss_humane/

The List
Do

  1. Get a Benevolent Dictator
    Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no” to features that don’t fit the vision.
  2. Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
    Don’t rely on configurable behavior. It adds complexity, solves little, and most users will never touch it anyway. Usable default behavior is required.
  3. Design Around Tasks
    Figure out the tasks that people want to do with your software. Make those tasks as easy as possible. Kill any feature that gets in the way.
  4. Write a Plug-In Architecture
    It’s the only good solution I’ve seen to the dilemma of providing a complete feature set without bloating the application.
  5. User Testing, User Testing, User Testing!!
    Without user testing, you are designing by guesswork and superstition.

Comments

Very interesting! I think

Posted by Bevan on October 25, 2007 at 8:37am
Bevan's picture

Very interesting!

  1. I think drupal needs this
  2. Drupal is improving here but has a way to go. I think the ambiguity of the term 'user' in drupal makes this difficult.
  3. This is okay in most of core but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Improvement in this area is currently slow, but at least there is improvement. Contrib stuff varies from shocking to okay. Most drupal developers are great with the cogs, but not so good on usability and interface design. I've been trying to work out if the best way to improve this in drupal is to educate the developers, tell them how the interface SHOULD be, or something else.
  4. This isn't really related to usability IMO, but this is where drupal seriously kicks arse, and why it's UI and UX blunders are forgiven.
  5. Unfortunately this is difficult to do effectively at zero cost, or even on a low budget. Educating the drupal community how to observe and analyze a user's behavior to find blocks in a UI might help, but that is also a difficult task.

Ideas?

Bevan/

I think it also applies to

Posted by elv on October 25, 2007 at 12:48pm
elv's picture

I think it also applies to commercial software, and about any real product. The obvious example being Apple vs Microsoft. Apple has a (not exactly benevolent) dictator with a vision, OSX is pretty good out of the box (I had to configure my Windows XP to make it just bearable for daily use), and the apps that ship with the OS have a quite focused workflow (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie...).

Drupal doesn't have a clear audience. Designing an admin interface for both developers and technologically challenged editors is difficult. Also Drupal itself is not focused on one kind of websites like Wordpress is for blogs, it's UI has to be used for sites with very very different workflows.
A blogger will want fine grained control on his contents and images, the webmaster of a community website will want to mass edit everything. Then can we design an admin interface that is not a two heads monster? It's really challenging.

Hehe

Posted by eigentor on October 25, 2007 at 12:56pm
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This is fun. I like the phrase "not exactly benevolent".. Who apart from me knows the MAD-TV - Spoofs about Steven Jobs? To be found on YouTube. Hilarious...

Life is a process

Life is a journey, not a destination

Thanks for the link. Cross

Posted by rszrama on October 25, 2007 at 1:12pm
rszrama's picture

Thanks for the link. Cross posted this to the Ubercart forums... I think I'm often more benevolent than dictator, and it's just hard to know when trimming a feature will keep away a sizable section of an e-commerce system's potential user base. We'll be thinking through this and hopefully tightening up our development process!

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