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Comment by rjurney | Hacker News Reader

To get great usability - you need paying users clamoring for it. To implement it, you need central control around a unifying cognitive model.

Open source is bad at usability because FOSS projects are controlled by committees that can't even assign tasks, let alone create and enforce coherent cognitive models and elegant interfaces that express them.

You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just hasn't happened many times so far, because people are willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most problem domains.

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You can also get great usability from a lead developer with taste, and people that are actually interested in using the software.

Profit is certainly not the only incentive that drives people. Saving time and effort by fixing problems (usability and otherwise) is also a great motivator.

And yet it never works out that way on very many projects. Why is that?

I disagree. It certainly does happen, and there is plenty of usable open source out there, and lots of patches from users that increased usability. The problem is that it's hard to find people with taste. But this is true no matter what development model is used.

Toss in a lower barrier to entry with open source, and you end up with junk at the bottom. I suspect that if you took the top N proprietary and open source apps, you wouldn't find a usability difference. The average would only get dragged down if you include the half-finished releases of open source stuff that would never have made it to market in a proprietary environment.

For the same reasons that very few non-open projects have the kind of usability you're talking about.

Great commercial software has good usability because they pay good usability people. These people aren't as likely to donate their time to a FOSS project as are hackers who can code raw functionality.

True. But for Open Source projects, having a lead developer with taste is a matter of chance. And people using the software usually don't care about the "no-users" but only their own wants and needs.

In contrast, Closed Source products simply hire a professional interface designer if that's necessary to convince "no-users" to buy.

How many lead devels on OSS projects would bend before a pro UID who would contribute to the project?

There are projects for which mainstream UI design is unsuited or unimportant, and there are undoubtedly a few people whose egos would prevent it.

Apart from those, I would expect most projects would be happy to accept advice if the UID demonstrated competence.

Than how do we get UIDs to contribute to OSS?

At a guess, a large number of them.

That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not sure I believe it. It takes (much) longer for an app's usability to mature without some central arbiter, but "you need" it is far too strong a statement.

Without a central arbiter, an app's usability never matures.

Interesting. Could this central arbiter be a set of rules an principles, an algorythm? That would be a very complicated program, why not take a human mind? It's faster.

It could be. But it has to be central, because the cognitive model must be cohesive. This is a productive line of thinking.

Exactly. Ten years ago a lot of people would have told you that you need central control of code and full-time work from paid developers in a central office with careful managerial oversight to build powerful software. And all those people, many of them "experts," were laughably wrong.

I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.

I guess what I'm saying is that something major would have to change for this to happen. The current FOSS processes can't produce good usability on their own. I am not personally aware of any FOSS software that excels at usability, without a central company driving development.

That being said, my knowledge is not exhaustive... maybe there are examples that I am not aware of.

What you're arguing for is management. So you contradict yourself. You do need some careful managerial oversight because managers have to figure out what sorts of people they need to accomplish a task.

The GIMP's development process has strong central control around a unifying cognitive model.

Unfortunately the people in charge are idiots with terrible taste, and they've been under siege so long that they're deaf.

  > You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central
  > company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just
  > hasn't happened many times so far, because people are
  > willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most
  > problem domains.

Actually, Firefox was originally started by two guys as a reaction against the centralized development that was at the time occurring with the Mozilla browser. The Mozilla foundation officially came on board later, well after Firefox gained momentum and popularity.

And thus they were the central force driving good usability. They did it just for fun - or was it a company?

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