Big flame fest going on over at lists.osdl.org regard­ing print dialogs, “usabil­ity” and fea­tures. Kind of enter­tain­ing read­ing, kind of frus­trat­ing reading.

The paper tiger here is the ten­dency to assume intent behind any par­tic­u­lar result. In this par­tic­u­lar case it’s the assump­tion that options pro­vided by a PPD printer dri­ver aren’t exposed in the gnome print dia­log because they’re con­fus­ing to the user.

I’ve seen a num­ber of peo­ple com­plain about my own soft­ware (xchat-gnome) using sim­i­lar argu­ments. “Those idiots! They removed the abil­ity to get user infor­ma­tion!” “Those idiots! They removed the abil­ity to detach indi­vid­ual chan­nels from the main UI!” See­ing peo­ple I’ve never heard from before say things like that in pub­lic forums is painful — most of the time, xchat-gnome devel­op­ment is just me, and I’ve got school, work, and sev­eral other projects, in addi­tion to a usually-failing attempt at a social life. A lot of these kinds of prob­lems are non­triv­ial (such as detach­ing), and just because some­thing isn’t there doesn’t mean it will never be.

I won­der if any­body really talked to the gnome-print devel­op­ers about get­ting UI for the extra PPD options. Judg­ing from my own expe­ri­ence as both a user and a devel­oper, I’d be will­ing to bet that their answer would be “well, it’s hard and nobody’s fig­ured out how to do it right” rather than “we decided that our users were too stu­pid to use those fea­tures.” I’m not really famil­iar at all with these projects, so I’m just guessing.

There’s an old adage: never ascribe to mal­ice what can be ade­quately explained by incom­petance. I’d like to pro­pose an equiv­a­lent for the open-source world (and gnome in par­tic­u­lar). Never ascribe to mal­ice what can be ade­quately explained by a lack of time and man­power. I can’t think of any free soft­ware author who is will­ing to sac­ri­fice truly use­ful func­tion­al­ity in exchange for a slightly lower wid­get count.

In the ML thread, the word “usabil­ity” came up quite a bit. For the most part, peo­ple seem to be (quite cor­rectly) point­ing out that it’s a pretty mean­ing­less word. I got to won­der­ing — what does usabil­ity mean to me? I’ve writ­ten a lot of GUI soft­ware, and I gen­er­ally con­sider xchat-gnome to be pretty “usable,” but I’m not sure I ever really came up with a def­i­n­i­tion. After some thought, here it is: Soft­ware is usable when it pro­vides the func­tion­al­ity a user requires to exe­cute a cer­tain task, in a dis­cov­er­able (or at the very least least well-documented and learn­able) way, with said func­tion­al­ity orga­nized in log­i­cally and a min­i­mum of extra dis­trac­tion or clutter.

As always, there are peo­ple more elo­quent than I who have con­sid­ered this prob­lem. “A designer knows he has achieved per­fec­tion not when there is noth­ing left to add, but when there is noth­ing left to take away.”

Tags: rant, software, usability