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

[Listera]

Peter Trudelle:

> 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.

If one were to indulge in wanton prediction, a few scenarios sound possible:

+     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.

+     Create an increasing number of well-designed, high-visibility OSS apps
(like Firefox) for OSS developers to notice and, hopefully, emulate. This is
likely to happen naturally but will take ions.

+     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.

+     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.

+     The consumer/desktop facing OSS apps create a second OSS tier that's
for-fee. Part of the fees go to subsidizing UCD work by professionals. (Red
Hat has already established the notion of commercial OSS for the
enterprise.)

+     A general level of suckiness may be established as the OSS norm. Until
now OSS has been largely content with Windows emulation, so this is not so
farfetched. There are analogies to this, one that comes to mind is the sorry
state of public access TV channels in the U.S. after more than two decades.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba