Linux and fonts and Firefox and human-factors design

Fred puissante at lrc.puissante.com
Tue Oct 31 09:16:45 EST 2006


On Monday 30 October 2006 22:17, Paul Lussier uttered thusly:
> "Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
...
> >   So, now, we face another interesting choice: Do we throw away ten
> > years of UI history for people familiar with Mozilla?  Or do we
> > disable functionality that newbies seem to expect works?
>
> I personally, like you, see no problem with the default behavior.  But
> it is something I think *should* be easily customizable, and isn't.
>
> >   Should we generally disable middle-click-to-paste by default, since
> > newbies generally don't understand *that*, either?
>
> Again, I think it's a reasonable default, but can you even explain how
> to turn this off?  I could probably figure it out after about 30
> minutes of searching, tweaking, etc., but I certainly don't have a
> clue off the top of my head how to do it.  Though I can certainly see
> *why* someone would want to turn this off, especially if coming from
> Windows or Mac, or changing the bindings over to C-x/c/v...
>
> > These questions are hard to answer well.
>
> No I don't think their hard questions to answer.  I think what's hard
> is thinking about and implementing good usability features.  No one
> *wants* to think about this stuff.  It's not hard to implement, it's
> tedious and time consuming.  It's not an interesting problem.
> Fundamentally, I think that's the problem.

Actually, I think the problem runs deeper: user interfaces tend to be 
inflexible and non-intuitive. They are inflexible because they are designed 
up front to target a certain type of user, without regard (much) to that 
user's growth. A newbie is not a newbie forever (well, some are! :-); a 
neophyte will (hopefully) eventually grow into a master of the interface.

"Good Usability Features" is hard to implement partly because it is hard to 
know *up front* what features will really be usable. It requires an 
iterative process between the developers and the users, and when you are 
talking a mass user audience such as those who use browsers, word 
processors, and the like, that iterative process can be time consuming and 
expensive. Couple that with the potential PR impact of what might be 
perceived as a "bad" feature (or even a "good" one) and the ante is upped 
quite a bit -- as in you can be made or broken on the basis of what your 
product can do and how it's received -- and more importantly, how your 
competition (read: Microsoft) reacts to it.

Now throw on top of that the pressures of "time to market", "featuritis" 
because you "just got to have more features than your competitors", and you 
wind up with bugs galore that's foisted upon the mass audience. 

And just how many "features" in Microsoft Word are actually *used* by 90% of 
the audience, anyway? How many of those "features" would be immediately 
switched off -- if only the neophyte could figure out how? :-)

FOSS development differs from the commercially-driven development, for sure, 
but still many of those same pressures exist. OpenOffice has grown many of 
those annoying Microsoft "features", including its version of the infamous 
paperclip. Eeyck. 

The ideal user interface would be one where the user can give a fuzzy 
description or gesture of what he wants done, and the computer "magically" 
does the right thing. You really should be able to just tell your browser or 
word processor "I wanna cool-looking font that will convey a sharp, clean 
feeling", and the program instantly picks just the right one that you had in 
mind, or at least a *small* number of choices that is a near fit.

Well, we are far from that ideal. Computers today are simply nowhere near the 
sophistication of, say, HAL 9000, nor are they likely to be in the 
foreseeable future. (And boy would I love to be proven wrong here!!!!!!!!) 
Marvin Minsky still struggles in his pursuits with strong AI, after all 
these years. I still bash my head against the wall with voice-activated 
phone trees that becomes completely lost if you don't use the limited words 
in its vocabulary, or say things in a certain way it expects. And the "0" no 
longer brings you to a HUMAN operator like it did in the past. At least HAL 
was courteous enough to say, "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that!" HAL *fully* 
understood *exactly* what Dave wanted -- which is why he said, 'no way 
Jose' --, unlike today's 2006 lame voice-recognition software's "I didn't 
quite get that!" :-)

I am impressed with what FOSS has accomplished over the years. But the 
problem will always be that it will be really HARD to make software really 
EASY to use. And since software is written by us "geeks", we grow bored with 
trying to make it all so easy for the *neophyte*. Of course, the thing to do 
is have the *neophyte* design and write the software, but that would be like 
asking a coronary patient to do his own bypass!!!

-Fred


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