March 07, 2004
It happened to me too
Lots of people are referencing ESR's tale of woe regarding the CUPS UI. I had a very similar experience with CUPS. I was trying to get my HP LaserJet 2100DTN to print in duplex mode. It was decidedly non-trivial to figure out what needed to be done to get it to work. It was so arcane that I even had to write it down. [...]Computer software may have saved people an enormous amount of work and unleashed a tremendous amount of productivity, but its also been responsible for wasting an incredible amount of people's time on problems that should never have been there in the first place. If the "open source community" really wants to make an impact, then we are going to need to learn how to make software easy to use. This is true for every interface in software, user interfaces, and programming API's. Life is too short to waste time on stuff like this. [Ted Leung on the air]
A current flow of questions regarding real usability for real users. Posted by fgranger at March 7, 2004 05:59 PM | TrackBackIn a pair of recent essays, Eric Raymond tears into the open source community -- rightly so -- for its failure to deliver software that Aunt Tillie can use. He's spot on. One of his comments got me wondering, though:
If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programmers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries. If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying that if your system were configured a bit differently you really could print on a Windows machine, assuming you were unfortunate enough to own one. [Eric Raymond: An Open-Source Horror Story][...] Will open source folk ever conclude that Aunt Tillie represents a hard engineering problem, and decide to wrap their collective heads around it? Stranger things have happened. [Jon's Radio]
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