OSS and Usability

August 6, 2004  

I really enjoy learning about the more “human” side of what I do – that is, considering the user experience side of software. After all, most of the code we write is not just about geeking out – it’s about creating software / applications for a particular audience. And there’s no point in writing fantastic quality, high performance, state of the art code if the intended audience find it hard to use, hard to understand, cumbersome, etc. This means that there is a lot of psychology involved – almost the opposite end of the spectrum from problem solving, OO design and coding.

Folks in the field of usability have for years struggled to be taken seriously by programmers, project managers and others involved in software development. Having worked with a number of “Cognitive Scientists”, I can say that they are an invaluable resource and every development project with a human end-user must include such a resource from start to finish. Most developers have not spent 3 or 4 years at university studying this stuff and therefore do not have enough knowledge, nor do they usually have enough interest or time on a project to even come close to what a usability expert can do (though I’ve been on a few projects where that role has gone to me – or I’ve taken it on – because I’ve got the most interest and knowledge – not that I have minded, but an expert would have done much better. And that has always been on top of development responsibilities).

An issue that has arisen lately and again stirred the user experience vs. techie fire is the lack of user experience consideration in open source software. It seems that, in general, UX experts do not feel welcome / appreciated / needed on OSS projects and most developers do not realise / recognise / appreciate the need for UX experts. There is an interesting article at OK/Cancel regarding this, in response to this (rather embarrassing, if you ask me) article on NewsForge.

So, to get to my point: One comment in the OK/Cancel article included a link to openusability.org, an open source portal that aims to bring developers and usability experts together. So, if you are an open source buff, how about looking there? You might be able to learn a thing or two about usability / user experience that you can then bring to other open source projects and even closed-source projects, if that’s your day job. My personal mission in the IT world is to educate developers to the need for user experience consideration and expertise. This site goes some way in doing that.

Some useful usability websites:

Ok/Cancel

happycog.com

useit.com