Re: the same page

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 19Dec2001 12:57AM (-0800), Seth Nickell wrote:
>
> "Creating a good user experience requires that everyone working on a
> project be on the same page -- something that is decidedly not the case
> in the open source community."

At Apple, there are definitely significant disagreements over major
aspects of the user experience. And sometimes this leads to bad design
- such as the current Mac OS X system for managing file types, which
combines some of the worst aspects of the Mac Classic design and the
NeXT design. So people at Apple aren't always on the same page.

However, working in GNOME, I'm sometimes not sure that we are even all
in the same book.

The big disadvantage we have in the area of UI design is that there is
no person or group to have the final say. But realistically, this will
not change, so we need to look for ways to turn this weakness into a
strength. 

We have a lot of smart people working on this project. If even half of
those educate themselves about usability, and aim for user-centered
design in their projects, then we will have an amazing collection of
talent focused on usability.

Already I see GNOME moving in the right direction - streamlining and
simplifying the design. On the other hand, KDE is still at times
headed in the airplane cockpit direction. Their default window manager
setup has six buttons(!).

So I think we're doing pretty well here. But again, because we have no
real central authority, we all need to take the responsibility to
learn about usability and to try to apply what we learn.

 - Maciej