Jakob Nielsen Comments On FOSS
Builer AU recently published an interview with Jakob Nilesen and his position on usability in the Free and Open Source Software community.
His perspective is the general audience of OSS is “geek” and they have more interested in features than color. Being active in the usability movement for OSS, I can say there is a lack of support on both the usability and developer ends. Not all of the developers appreciate outside criticism about their applications and are willing to make sometimes substantial changes to the code to fix cosmetics. The usability mailing lists are full of people who don’t have a very strong background in usability and argue to no end, trying to support their weak positions on design and cognitive reasoning. I am far from an expert, but try my best to create objective reports which are open to argument and change. There will always be differences of opinion, but hopefully things will become easier once developers become more educated and familiar with guidelines and standards.
seele :: Aug.24.2004 :: General, HCI, Open Source :: 1 Comment »
It must be Jakob Nielsen week: Searching for answers on the WWW