Usability of free software tends to suck and how Mozilla Labs wants to address it
Matthew Paul Thomas is listing In this follow up post to the 2002 article “Why Free Software usability tends to suck” lots of reasons “Why Free Software has poor usability”.
Item number three on his list is :
“Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.”
Exactly this point seems to be addressed in Mozilla Labs recent call (August 2008) for participation:
“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.
You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.”
We really hope that Mozilla Labs call for participation will lead to great results (maybe we will even come up with our own idea and proposal).
But we find on Matthew Paul’s list of “Why Free Software has poor usability” also two items that highlight some of the challenges for Mozilla Labs “Call to participation”:
”
6) To many cooks
…
12) Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth.
When developers are in the same room, they can discuss interaction design using whiteboards, paper prototypes, spoken words, and gestures. But on the Internet, these often aren’t available, making discussions much slower and prone to misunderstandings.”
Let us not worry too much. Mozilla Labs call for participation is also your chance to influence the future of the web.
That should be worth some free of charge creativity efforts, don´t you think so?
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August 6th, 2008 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Good Ideas, Interesting Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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