[Sigia-l] Salt in Sugar

[James Aylett]

Lots of speculation in this email. If anyone has any other experience,
or hard data, I'd be fascinated to be proven wrong in every respect :-)

Ziya Oz wrote:

> OSS has so far been about developers. Not users and certainly not
> designers. 

Well... OSS is generally about developers-as-users, ie most of the
successful OSS is written to satisfy a requirement of the developers.
They can, naturally, figure out what will be right for them in terms of
interfaces pretty well. It may not be the most innovative solution, and
it may have redundant features, but it will serve them. It may not,
however, serve anyone else.

I'm not convinced that the "usual" wide open, anyone can jump in,
mechanic for OSS will work in producing software with a broader
audience. Most of the success here seems to come from companies
sponsoring the work. I suspect it's difficult for individuals to really
grasp what that means (this is a hunch based on what I've observed in
myself and others moving from individual projects into a larger team
building broader products, so I'm probably wrong :-).

> As a designer (and developer) who has been fighting against the
> supremacy of developers for a long time, I find that alarming.

I suspect part of the reason developers are "supreme" in OSS is because
of the lower cost of entry (why they are supreme sometimes in other
environments is an entirely different issue). Given a computer, all you
need to be an OSS developer is time and ability. As soon as you want to
introduce user testing, for instance, you need time from people who
aren't developers (in fact, from people who aren't invested in the
project at all). I'm not saying it can't happen, just that it's harder
to get off the ground. Obviously there are design things that can be
done without those higher costs... there may be an issue with OSS
developers simply not understanding why designers want to bother (the
"well *I* understand that the box marked 'X' means 'delete everything'"
problem). (This may be changing with webdev; certainly my experience of
conversations around the London, UK webdev scene suggest that developers
and designers are getting on, getting together and doing interesting
things. Maybe I'm just not noticing all the failures, though.)

On the testing front, what might help would be initiatives such as
building a pool of people happy to participate in user testing for
various types of OSS. I don't know how easy it would be to find such
people, though ... and there are still complexities in carrying out
tests. And that's not all of the problem.

Later, Ziya wrote:

> OSS in general hopes to break out of the developer niche and become a
force
> on the desktop, as well as on mobile and new media platforms. So it
has to
> broaden its horizon.

I don't think OSS in general hopes to do anything. There are a lot of
cheerleaders who, quite frankly, are just talking, but most OSS people I
know are focussed on one thing: making their project the best for
whatever they're trying to do. When I think about the people who said
things like "let's take over the desktop", or "let's make the best
graphical environment ever", they usually went off the rails pretty soon
afterwards. (I suspect this isn't specific to OSS - how many commercial
desktop environments have failed?)

> But why should developer-targeting software be obtuse?

Your idea of what is obtuse may be different to others. I have
developers here who feel IDEs are obtuse and painful; I have others who
couldn't dream of using anything else. Personally I find awkward any
system I can't drive entirely by keyboard, which effectively rules out
quite a lot of software. Many OSS development tools I find easier to use
than, for instance, commercial solutions such as Dreamweaver or
VisualStudio. YMMV ;-)

> Many programming IDE interfaces or installation/configuration
procedures
> reduce developers to sub-human level. Those developers are lazy,
incompetent
> or uncaring of others' time and experience: in any case the results
are
> horrible. They don't have to be.

This isn't OSS-specific though, is it? Or specific to developer-centric
tools either - the worst installer experience I've ever had was with
Adobe CS1 (which told me that everything was installed and working
properly when it hadn't actually copied anything onto my computer at
all). The problem I have with many of these systems seems to be when
they try to hide too much complexity, rather than just enough. (That and
the keyboard thing.)

> The attitude, "fix it yourself or stop whining" has got to die.

Why? If it was expressed as "fix it yourself (or pay for it to be fixed)
or stop whining", would you still oppose it? If so, isn't there an
assumption that other people should act unselfishly? While it's a lovely
idea that individuals can generally be persuaded to act unselfishly, I
don't think it's actually realistic. Some will, and that's great. (And
yes, we probably shouldn't say that people are whining, because that's
not very pleasant. Point still remains.)

> 37signals, RoR, Expression, Flex, etc., essentially refute the notion
that
> developers' time/experience can be abused. To that extent, they point
to a
> solution. We may or may not agree with their design approach but they
> elevate design, by not treating it as an afterthought.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. I thought the point of RoR
was that it acknowledged that it's possible to abuse developers' time
and experience, and by providing something which doesn't abuse them,
gives a better environment? (Whether it actually achieves that is
another question.) I'm probably misunderstanding completely what you
mean...

James

-- 
James Aylett
 Chief Technical Officer, Tangozebra
 phone 020 7535 9850
 skype james.aylett

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