[Sigia-l] Open Source Usability -- curable?

[Peter Trudelle]

Good luck.  In most open source projects I'm aware of, all power flows 
from the output of a compiler.  The only hope of adding significant 
design, usability or even engineering for that matter, is to convince 
the people doing the coding that it is either necessary or fun. There is 
a lot of education to be done about what design is (they think more in 
terms of the design of the code), and why to make the products usable, 
and for whom, and how.  Currently, their main focus in this regard seems 
to be on documented standard guidelines for UI, usually per platform. I 
think this is because it is easy to agree on compliance, although such 
guidelines are obviously not sufficient to ensure good design and 
usability.   Projects have little or no incentive to devote much effort 
to these issues for their current target users, and huge dis-incentive 
to alienate programmers, whose code is the life blood of the project.  
If any progress is to be made, it will be one developer at a time, 
although you might be able to attract some developers to some cool new 
project you start with a focus on UCD.

Peter

Listera wrote:

>Dave: 
>  
>
>>If an OS project instituted something like these requirements, then
>>the projects themselves would not be so run by engineering mindsets
>>and we can start working more x-functionally on OS projects.
>>    
>>
>
>These would definitely help. But I wouldn't stop there. As the original
>article suggested, they are reactive, corrective and incremental, always a
>step behind what programmers are doing.
>
>In enterprise settings, there may be some counterbalancing forces like
>marketing people, business analysts, IA/UI/UX designers (if lucky), etc. In
>most OSS settings, all you get is programmers. It is hard to reform that
>situation.
>
>I think the fundamental solution is to wrestle the overall vision,
>architecture and flow of the app away from programmers. As long as
>programmers are "designing" instead of "implementing" we will always have
>these issues.
>
>----
>Ziya
>
>Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
>
>
>
>------------
>When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
>*Plain text, please; NO Attachments
>
>Searchable list archive:   http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
>________________________________________
>Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
>Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l
>  
>