03 Mar 2004
Wed, 03 Mar 2004
Everybody Weighs In On Open Source UI
I started writing this as a comment to Don Park's piece which is a reaction to ESR's piece on open source UI. I thought ESR's piece was really good in that it patiently unearthed the difficulties of such software. Sam Ruby covered John Udell's investigation into the problem as well. My reaction got long and complicated enough that I didn't feel like a comment was the right place for it.
What the open source world needs is not more groups or more widgets. Most of what's wrong with open source UI can be explained in a single book titled The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by a Swarthmore professor named Barry Schwartz.
Part of the responsibility of the UI and in turn, it's designer, and I think what ESR was getting at, is to eliminate choices that make no sense. This interview with Ethan Diamond of oddpost fame describes the problem rather succinctly. Diamond says, "So, we started with the basic three-pane layout familiar to users of Outlook, Eudora, ccMail, and so on, and then we systematically eliminated every non-data pixel from the screen."
Fundamentally, I think this is one of the hardest things for a coder to do because it involves throwing away your baby, which is anathema to the culture. The best designer you can get is going to function largely in the form of "no one cares about this so you should get rid of it". Enough has been written about what's wrong with the culture in terms of not on-boarding UI design people and so guys like me who operate in code and UI is about as good as it's going to get without a major cultural shift.
The best groups do this before the code ever gets written, but in the open source world it's more likely to operate in the form of hack a prototype, then eliminate stuff, as you see guys in the gnome lists refer to "HIGifying" applications.
I spent the last few days hacking nautilus to get rid of the next to useless information view in the sidebar and default to the tree view. Nielsen would say that it's a matter of precedent, people expect a tree view when they launch a file manager, but Andy Hertzfeld at eazel spent some time coding the information panel in what was I'm sure an attempt to copy the Microsoft pie-chart-of-my-disk view that appears in My Computer. The problem is when you combine the information panel with a default right pane containing the user's home folder, you add no value.
Making a UI change to nautilus like this should have been rather simple but for some strange reason, the architecture has all of the views save for the information panel implemented as component plugins that are enabled via bonobo activation. The information panel is the only one that's not a plugin, which makes the code look a bit odd since the information panel is hard coded in nautilus and makes it harder than it should be to implement the kind of change that I described above.
It's not clear to me why information panel wasn't implemented as a component plugin to be bonobo-activated like the others. Then, setting up defaults is merely a case of which plugins are enumerated in the bonobo query. While this sounds fundamentally complicated to the uninitiated, it's something I could easily describe to a UI guy, "Simply look at ...
/usr/lib/bonobo/servers/Nautilus_View*.server
and remove the ones you don't want". Compare that to what was actually required which included the bonobo step as well as a little /**/ in the C code and the usual configure-make-make install and you realize that you have a UI that is expensive to change, owing to the fact that it requires someone who knows the ins and outs of a C compiler, which may have been what Don was getting at in referring to separation of concerns. In this way, you can see that the architecture of the application directly influences the UI in terms of placing very real engineering costs on changes to the UI.
Finally, consider what this means in terms of the GPL. My addition to the code was "/**/" and a couple make hacks. In real terms, this removed parts of the application. If I contribute according to the terms of the GPL, I may have improved the UI in usability terms depending on your perspective, but I've subtracted code in terms of sheer line count metrics. Hmm...
Posted at: 10:56 | permalink
Social Networking Software That Doesn't Suck
It's a dog eat dog world out there.
Posted at: 01:23 | permalink
