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Essay: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it

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Dormouse:
I think the big problem with the essay is that it confuses big projects, medium projects and small team/single developer projects. In my experience the problems of each of these groups are quite different.

tomos:
This was one of the better articles I've read on the subject because its author delineates people like me who approach an app with design in mind compared to a programmer who's building for function (not form)
-zridling (August 06, 2008, 05:56 AM)
--- End quote ---
coming from the same place as Zaine,
and from the article:
Proprietary software vendors typically make money by producing software that people want to use. This is a strong incentive to make it more usable. (It doesn’t always work: for example, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe software sometimes becomes worse but remains dominant through network effects. But it works most of the time.)-
I disagree there, to an extent, - there is the pressure for upgrades to introduce new features (discussed elsewhere here) and the interface & design in general comes a big second I think

if I had enough money (well I do, but it's way down my shopping list), I would change from e.g. Acronis True Image in a shot - even though it seems to be ahead of most similar priced competitors in terms of features ...
it just really bugs me to see a programme at version X - V.#11 in Acronis TI's case and to see an interface that has obviously grown over the years with the programme but little or no obvious priority given to it's ease of use
Let's see, same with most printer drivers, Microsoft OS's, I'm not that familiar with Adobe's more recent stuff so cant comment there but from what I've seen Illustrator could do with a re-write but that's more to do with efficiency/speed than interface in particular.

Ease of use is so important, well, to a lot of us out here. Ironically not so important to bigger companies but to smaller business's / self-employed time is money.
If something takes 10 mouse-clicks when you can see an easy option to make it 2 or 3, that's when I want to jump ship ;)

zridling:
Often, the more people for which a program is design, the worse it is. Take enterprise software, for example: it's unusable half the time!

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