23 Jan 2007 0829H

Usability and Open Source

This weekend while waiting to pick up my parents from that time honored and unfortunately, dying (at least, in our family) tradition of ginormous Chinese wedding banquets, I was at the local cafe readying an article on wireframing based on learnings from my current project. I’m still readying it. Instead this week I give you pointers to Larry Constantine’s letter in the MIT Tech Review and a Google link to the sprawling world of usability in open source projects.

The usability of interfaces in open source projects is notoriously bad. I won’t be the first or last to say that’s probably why Open Source software hasn’t gained broader acceptance, since even trying to installing the software sometimes requires some recondite knowledge. It’s not recondite to programmers, sniffs the open source crowd, and therein lies the problem. Constantine has reminded us again that in the spirit of open source, people who are really interested in improving the user experience should tackle it in a communal manner, since, in his terms, “usability is increasingly the battleground for competing programs.”

I agree. I think this is a great place for beginning UE people to get their feet wet; the main problem being that as a class exercise, there is a continuity problem with students leaving and entering projects and generally being not reliable. If contributing to an open source project was part of design education, this might require some substantial restructuring of the current educational system as well . . .

In any event, here’s a link to the Google search for usability and open source. There’s a lot of talk out there about “open usability,” but what I think people really mean by that is “open user experience,” which is a framework for coordinating the information architecture, interaction design, communications design, and usability/human factors elements into transforming good software into superior quality product.

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