Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Mon 4th Aug 2008 14:35 UTC, submitted by Hakime
"The best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain largely unfixed." Personal Note: I am not sure how many people feel that Free Software has poor usability. As far as the desktop environment, I find most of linux window managers to be the more user-friendly than Windows and OS X.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
If OSS has a usability problem, it is because of the freedom for developers not to appreciate something like the HIG, and act according to that.
In free software, you just can't force anyone to abide these guidelines. So you can only hope someone understands the need for something like the HIG. All the Gnome team can do is not including the software in Gnome, but if it already is, then it will be hard to get the application follow the guidelines.
In a company, people are just as free to disagree, but there are more tools to make sure that the guidelines are being followed. And in a company, there are customers and there are designers, and they have some power.
The focus on the HIG has made Gnome very pleasant to use. And while i have my doubts on the validity of the HIG for the next generation user interfaces, i feel that for this generation, the HIG was absolutely great. And for the open source community it was a groundbreaking effort.
And what do you know, even KDE has a HIG nowadays.