A few colleagues have pointed me to the article by movie director-sounding blogger Matthew Paul Thomas entitled “Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It.”

I’ve given you the link to the original Thomas article, but I’m more interested in discussing Johnathan Gruber’s take on it. Says Gruber in this post:

I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. This applies universally, not just to free and open source software. For example, it explains why Microsoft produces such crummy software even though the company employees [sic] thousands of talented programmers and even designers — Microsoft’s decision makers have no taste. But the problem is endemic to open source.

The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in user interfaces; people with good taste in user interface design are seldom in charge of open source software projects.

Put another way, if you have to ask for better design, you will lose. You need to be in a position to demand it.

Yes. (Adding some more later in the day…) Aside from the comment about Microsoft’s decision makers having “no taste” - undoubtedly a reference to Steve Job’s comment about Microsoft - I have personally seen what can happen when leaders demand better design…and what can happen when they don’t.

Design leadership *has* to come from the top. It can’t be, as Cooper said in February at IxDA 2008 - an “insurgency” driven from below.

Matthew Paul Thomas :: Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It

Just found a good article at ZDNet that talks about the LinuxHaters site. It’s not really a site for true haters, it’s more a site where people can socialize and discuss particularly egregious usability or functionality issues Linux has…and the community can figure out what to fix.

If it helps drive out usability problems from Linux distros, I’m all for it.

Tough Love: Linux Needs More Haters :: Between The Lines :: ZDNet.com

Ars Technica is reporting that several patent reform advocacy groups have banded together to collaborate on the effort to abolish software patents.

Says Ars:

Supported by the Free Software Foundation, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center, the End Software Patents (ESP) project aims to challenge the legal validity of patents that do not specify a physically innovative step. In addition to helping companies challenge software patents in the courts and in the patent office, the ESP project will also work to educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.

This is an important effort, and one that UX professionals should support. As I described in my article a few months back in UXmatters, software patents do more harm than good. They stifle innovation rather than protect and nurture it. As I wrote in UXmatters:

The sad fact is that companies often file for and the US government actually grants patents for user interface and interaction design “innovations” that are either strikingly obvious or have appeared before in other systems—that is, when prior art exists, as someone in the field of intellectual property would say. This means, as user experience practitioners, we are at risk of litigation every time we design an application. Each time we fire up Visio or Photoshop, create a new design, then put it out into the world, there’s a good chance we’re infringing on someone’s patent.

I hope that those of you who are active in the user experience field will learn more about this issue and choose to stand with the ESP project. Even if you don’t agree with me (and them), it behooves you to learn more about the issue. It’s quite easy to ignore - until you find yourself staring down the barrel of an injunction or subpoena.

Patent Reform Coalition Aims to Abolish Software Patents

Blogged with Flock

Tags: patents, open source, law

Drop what you’re doing right now and go look at the screenshots of Android, Google’s open-source smartphone OS.

It’s…it’s…beautiful.

I want one. Now. Not now. Yesterday.

I know it’s not even a real phone yet, it’s just a reference design. But I want my next phone to run this platform. That’s how neat it looks.

A Visual Tour of Android’s UI - Engadget

Or general availability as we called it in the telecom software world.

Again, go get yourself a copy. It’s the most enjoyable, highly functional web browser out there.

In a post somewhat related to my “the desktop metaphor is dead” diatribes, my favorite open-source pinko commie has written about how and why the desktop OS is inching its way to irrelevance.

I think I agree. Google and a few other web-based productivity tool vendor are either furiously working on or already releasing beta versions of their software that allow the user to work in offline mode.

The day is coming when you will start your computer thusly:

• You turn on your machine.
• A very lightweight OS is loaded; it could be GNU/Linux, Open BSD, whatevah. It doesn’t even necessarily have to have a significant amount of GUI itself; it only needs to be able to display a browser via a GUI.
• The OS loads a TCP/IP communications stack, device drivers, and searches for a (wired or wireless) connection, authenticating itself as appropriate.
• An (open-source of course) browser opens, and presents some or all of the projects, documents, spreadsheets, etc. the user is working with.
• The user works. Through the magick of AJAX all the user’s content is implicitly saved.
• If for some reason the user’s PC goes offline, the applications automatically go into offline mode, saving up the changes the user has made, and adding them into the document when a connection is reestablished.

I truly believe it’s that simple. Of course this is basically the idea behind the network appliance that was touted by many a guru at the turn of the century. It didn’t pan out then for now-obvious reasons: the online productivity apps weren’t mature enough. Well, now they are.

Hard OCP has published a very good article about one user’s first 30 days on the Linux platform.

I found the article to be very thorough. It really provides a you-are-there feel to the author’s trials and tribulations. Highly recommended.

Blogged with Flock

Last summer I blogged about my problems accomplishing even simple configuration tasks in the Ubuntu Linux distro. (Here are links to the first post and the second post.)

I noticed that someone in the open source community quite helpfully posted an explanation of how I could solve one of my Linux problems. I appreciate that quite a lot. However, the solution itself just reinforces my point that Linux is not as usable as it needs to be for the mainstream computing herd.

Here’s the excerpted solution:

When you logged in as root in the command window, you made it so that command window was running a session using the root login. However, the rest of your system was logged in using your normal user name, which does not have “root” privileges. So, if you open a text editor using the menuing system, then that instance of the editor is running using your normal login, not root. Hence, the editor will not be able to store a file the GRUB “menu.lst” file (I think this is what you’re trying to edit, right?).

What you need to do is invoke the editor from within the command window where you are logged in as root. If your editor is gedit, you can do this by typing the following at the comand line:

gedit &

Before you actually change “menu.lst” I recommend making a backup copy of the current version by going to the correct directory within your command window where you’re logged in as root and entering something like:

cp menu.lst menu.lst_ok

You probably knew the command, but the point is it has to be done within the command window where you’ve changed your user to root.

Ubuntu also provides an alternative approach for opening an editor with “root”/superuser privileges:

1. open a command/terminal window
2. execute: sudo gedit
3. enter your password

This runs a session of the gedit editor as user “root”.

Again, great help from the community. But the solution is tragi-comically (comi-tragically?) complex. Remember, I was just trying to change the boot order! I shouldn’t have to possess all that conceptual background knowledge.

Blogged with Flock

Slagging on software EULA’s (”end user license agreements”) goes in and out of fashion. Since I’m perpetually the third-to-last guy to hop on a bandwagon, I figured I’d at least be consistent and join this party late as well.

So let’s get right to it: software EULA’s are broken. They’re unusable. And not just for the reasons you might think. Pretty much everything about the EULA experience is horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s start with the legalese. I’m aware of how and why legal writing has become so impenetrable and difficult to parse. (For more on this, check out this Wikipedia article.) Defenders of the language and style of legal writing point to the need to disambiguate as much as possible and cover all potential contingencies when writing law or a contract. But that argument is specious. Bloated, meandering legalese is created by lazy people who can’t be bothered to express their thoughts and intent clearly and succinctly.

Here’s an example of laziness in action (now *that’s* a contradiction in terms…) that I just encountered while attempting to install a software application I was interested in evaluating. For the curious, I was installing the open source version of SugarCRM, an application for managing customer and sales information. Let me be clear about one thing: I am NOT singling out SugarCRM for extra-special vituperation. They’re just doing what everyone else does. Their EULA experience is really no better or worse than any other vendor’s.

I started the SugarCRM install, and in one or two clicks was presented with this screen:

I don’t typically give the EULA screen more than a nanosecond of thought, but something spurred me to actually check out the license agreement. I started scrolling the text box, but quickly grew frustrated. So I put my pointer in the text box and pressed CTRL+A (”select all”) to highlight the EULA text. I planned to copy it and then drop it into a Word doc.

Surprise… the text didn’t highlight.

Now I know a usability issue when I see it. My curiosity was piqued: just how bad *was* this user experience? So I manually highlighted the EULA text on the first line, and then dragged my pointer downward. Sure enough, the text started highlighting. I figured I’d just keep my index finger down for however long it took to highlight the entire text, then try CTRL+C (”copy”).

The scrollbar indicator was taking an awfully long time to move downward. Then I noticed just how small the scrollbar indicator rectangle was… and I knew this might take a while.

After a solid 2 minutes, I had finally selected the entire block of text in SugarCRM’s EULA screen. Of course, upon pressing CTRL+C I received no indication that the text block had actually copied to the clipboard. But I took the chance, opened up Word, and pressed CTRL+V (”paste”).

When Word stopped grinding, the first thing I did was look at the page count at the bottom left of the status bar.

It said the document was SIXTY PAGES LONG.

Back in the day, I had occasionally seen Word spaz out on a page count; so I hopped to the end of the document then back to the beginning, thinking that the page count would settle down to a reasonable number.

It stayed at sixty pages.

Sixty single-spaced, twelve-point, Times New Roman, one-inch vertical by one-and-a-quarter-inch horizontal margined pages.

Guess how many words?

It has 18,284 of ‘em.

I’ve posted the EULA here so you can revel in its repulsiveness.

So let’s review: the application’s EULA is sixty pages long in Word. The text box on the EULA screen is 470 pixels wide by 135 tall (less if you subtract the gutters). And you can’t easily copy/paste the EULA into an easier-to-read format; you’re expected to read it in this tiny 470-by-135 aperture. Here’s the kicker: it’s written in dense legalese, with seemingly random switches between sentence case and upper case.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

It’s almost like they DON’T WANT you to read it. Typically, the only people who want you to agree to a legal contract without fully understanding it are slimy car salespeople and dishonest mortgage loan officers. Now I doubt that anyone at Sugar actually thinks like that; a quick perusal of their site shows that they’re committed open-sourcers who do much for the development community. In short, they seem like good people.

So why the unusable EULA? Probably the typical reasons: the developer who coded the installer forgot to enable right-click select/copy/paste in the EULA text box. And the Sugar legal team undoubtedly just concatenated the separate boilerplate licenses for the open-source components installed with SugarCRM, then added in a bit of their own liability-proofing text for good measure. In other words, they were lazy. What resulted is an unfriendly, unusable mess.

Now I was even more curious, and I wanted to do some comparative EULA-gawking. So I played around with the next two apps I had occasion to install: Windows Live Messenger and the iTunes 7.1 update.

Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft’s instant messenger app had a surprisingly readable EULA, but was a snooze-inducing 12 pages and 6,343 words long. The EULA text box was super tiny at 415 by 100 px, but it did permit both keyboard and right-click select/copy/paste.

I’ve posted the EULA here for your edification and enjoyment.

iTunes

Apple’s iTunes EULA experience was not considerably better or worse than the other two. While (relatively) brief at five pages/2,091 words, it yelled at me (i.e., was in all caps) at random times. Guess that famed Apple user experience doesn’t extend to the EULA. Here’s a screenshot showing the generous-for-this-crowd text box aperture:

The EULA itself can be found here. It too suffers from a bad case of boilerplate-itis.

Usable EULAs

This is the part of the rant where I should tell everyone how to create a better EULA experience. So without further ado…here are my recommendations for more usable EULAs:

• Content: Lose the legalese. Lawyers, say no to boilerplate. Say yes to plain language. And try your best to keep it brief. Not only will you communicate more effectively, the lay community might hate you less.
• Readability and flexibility: Display a bigger text box, provide easier ways to select/copy/paste, provide a print button, or (preferably) do all three.

And while we’re on the subject of readability… I also recommend NOT SHOUTING AT YOUR READER. PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE READING IN ALL CAPS. Sentence case is much more civil, don’t you agree?

So that’s all I have today about the EULA experience. I know several other people have written about the sorry state of software EULA’s, so here’s a few links for you. And thanks for listening to my EULA kvetch.

More about EULAs at:

Boing Boing: ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA
Ben Edelman: EULAs Gone Bad
EFF: Now the Legalese Rootkit: Sony-BMG’s EULA

Found this article on installing Ubuntu Linux in my web meanderings. A blogger who looks an awful lot like a young Newt Gingrich decided to rate the difficulty of installing Ubuntu as well as associated configuration tasks like setting up dual monitors, installing Wine (an open API that allows running Windows programs on Unix/X Window systems), getting WiFi to work, etc.

Not surprisingly, installing graphics drivers and a multi-monitor setup was very hard. Ya think? My readers (all three of you) will remember my epic n00b struggles with Linux. Sigh.

Various sites on the web are reporting first looks at the the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) user interface. Try this link to see some screenshots.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of the OLPC, the short version is that Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab are pushing the idea that every kid in developing countries should have a portable personal computer. You can learn more about the OLPC here.

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I don’t think this is such a hot idea. I think Negroponte and the Media Lab are too sanguine about the “transformative” power of technology. There are too many unmet basic needs in developing countries. What the hell is a bunch of laptops going to do for these people?

Happy World Usability Day.

This event, now in its second year, was intended to raise awareness around the globe of how important usability is to our everyday lives. It’s succeeding beyond our wildest dreams. And that’s great.

But I’d like to introspect for just a moment here. Those of you who work in the field, stop and give yourself a mental pat on the back. And then tell yourself how fortunate you are to have stumbled upon a field that is so engaging, fulfilling, and exciting. Admit it. Every day when you wake up and go to work, you’re secretely thankful that you’re not a lawyer, a doctor, a software developer, and so on. You’re a soldier in the user experience army. And it’s the best damn career you can imagine.

You know it’s true. You tell yourself that at least once a week, don’t you?

I know *I* do…

Podcasts….me likee…

Today I got an email from someone who said that they read my podcast post, and was interested in learning which podcasts I listen to.

When I finally picked myself up off the floor (someone actually *reads* this blog?!?), I sent the nice fellow a list - well, a screenshot actually - of the podcasts I’m subscribed to in iTunes. You can look at the ugly screengrab in all its glory, or you can just continue reading to find out what I’m listening to when you pull up next to me at a stoplight.

All In The Mind - “Radio National’s weekly foray into the mental universe, the mind, brain and behaviour. Everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.”

Buzz Out Loud - “C|Net’s podcast of indeterminate length.”

Cranky Geeks - “Hosted by PC Magazine contributing editor John C. Dvorak. Each week a group of expert panelists discuss the most controversial topics in tech.”

Engadget podcast - Should need no explaining to this crowd…

Entrepreneurship, powered by Podtech - “The Entrepreneurship podcasts provide information and tips about business, marketing, and other topics, including startup technology, media business, mashups, DEMO2006, information management, Web 2.0, blog trends, search engines, decentralized computing, online TV distribution, and the future of technology, to name a few.”

Floss Weekly - A show about “Free Libre Open Source Software.”

IT Conversations - A series of recorded interviews with tech heavies. From GigaVox Media.

Mac OS Ken - “Ken Ray brings 12 years of radio experience and 6 years of tech-news work to the Mac world.”

New York Times Science Times - Stories from the NYT’s Tuesday science section.

NPR: Satire From The Unger Report - “Communiques from the edge of America by humorist Brian Unger of NPR’s “Day-to-Day.”

NPR: Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American - “The Scientific American Podcast is a weekly science audio show covering the latest in the world of science and technology. Join host Steve Mirsky each week as he explores cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues with leading scientists and journalists.”

Slate Explainer Podcast - “Explainer podcasts feature answers to those little questions you have about the news (but were afraid to ask).”

Slate Magazine Daily Podcast

The Big Squeeze - A British comedy duo’s podcast. Yes, nudity on an audio show: “Brian and Georgina’s quirky “talking bollocks” show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world! Contains strong language and nudity.”

This Week In Tech - “Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, John C. Dvorak, and other tech luminaries join a roundtable discussion of the latest trends in high tech.”

So I was listening to a 7 or 8 month old podcast from IT Conversations that featured one of the lead developers of Flock demo’ing a developer release of their web browser.

Even though I was listening to an audio version of a live demo, it just sounded too cool to pass up. So here I am, composing my first post on Flock’s blog tool.

I gotta say, it’s a damn site better than that tiny little text box that Six Apart crammed into the “New Entry” screen of Movable Type…I am really liking this.

Blogged with Flock

Regular readers of UsabilityBlog (now *that’s* an amusing concept…) know of my recent struggles with Linux. Not content to leave bad enough alone, I decided to try fixing a nagging little annoyance on my (now) dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows desktop.

I shouldn’t have bothered.
Read the rest of this entry »

For the love of Bob, please help Linux and open-source applications get better.

The KDE organization has a usability project you can contribute to. So does the GNOME project.

If you’re interested in making open source software easier to use, start with the two GNU/Linux desktop vendors. Or start here.

If open source software and GNU/Linux are ever going to win hearts and minds, they have to stop focusing on the hobbyists and the already-converted. I doubt that any of our mothers and fathers want to stop/start X servers, or log in at different runlevels.

I really, really want to like Linux. But it’s just not likable. Because it’s just not usable! Case in point: I downloaded and installed the latest version of the Xandros Desktop distribution. I actually got further than I did with the Ubuntu cluster-f of April, in that Xandros recognized my Ethernet card, grabbed a DHCP-assigned NAT address from my router, and got onto the Internet without me having to futz around.

But here’s the thing: anytime I try to do ANYTHING to a Linux installation that requires even a small bit of customization, everything goes down the toilet.
Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in 2004 Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted a long but very interesting rant about why open-source GNU/Linux software is hard to use.

The article itself was a response to a misguided, condescending post from a Linux alpha geek about how he couldn’t figure out printer-sharing on a networked Linux box. The geek’s take was that the software should be made “easy enough for Aunt Tillie,” and implied that UI design in the open-source world was close to achieving this.

Gruber rightly pointed out that the open-source developer ranks were nowhere near to achieving that level of usability in their software, and would never achieve it as long as they treated UI design as an afterthought.

A somewhat long, but worthwhile read.

I just ran across openusability.org, a site devoted to connecting open source software developers and usability practitioners with an interest in contributing to open source projects.