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

[Peter Trudelle]

Listera wrote:

>+     Turn developers into IA/UI/UX designers, one developer at a time. Some developers are good at UI stuff, the vast majority isn't and (my prediction) will never be.
>
That may be true, but you only have to turn the leaders; the rest will 
follow, leave or be ignored.   Your citing of Firefox is a good  example 
of this. Mozilla has a few developers like that; fortunately they are 
now leading many others.

>+     Create an increasing number of well-designed, high-visibility OSS apps (like Firefox) for OSS developers to notice and, hopefully, emulate. 
>
Cool!  How do we do *that*?  To continue on your example, Firefox is not 
something entirely new, it is the latest evolution of a product line 
that goes back more than 10 years, reflecting hundreds of millions of 
dollars and uncounted lifetimes of development, including some very 
talented designers and usability pros

>+     Some larger-scale companies come into the OSS space with
>professionally designed software, as a front-end to their largely
>service-oriented for-fee offerings, thereby setting visible benchmarks.
>
Like Apple is supposedly trying to do?  I'm not sure how much they are 
helping OSS.

>+     Establish a rating organization made up of volunteer (less likely) or paid IA/UI/UX professionals (more likely, with grants from IBM, Novell, etc) to guide and rate submitted OSS apps for UCD compliance. The "seal of approval" is widely promoted and thus becomes a checklist item.
>
Interesting idea, but I hope you mean  testing with target users rather 
than having so-called experts rate them.  I think we're a long way from 
the notion of UCD "compliance", as if it were codified and standard. 
BTW, IBM and Novell still don't have enough of a focus on UCD in some 
of  their own software, IMO.

Perhaps some company <cough> (Google?) </cough> will  become wildly 
successful on the basis of advanced design and usability, prompting 
others to mimic the approach?  It could happen, and might be enough to 
transform the industry.

Peter