Good article about usability of open-source apps

[Sven Langkamp]

Am Dienstag 05 August 2008 17:41:10 schrieb Warren Baird:
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 3:41 AM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> > Yes -- it's a very interesting read, but even more interesting are the
> > reactions in the blogosphere, for instance by our own Celeste :-). Still,
> > there are problems this article doesn't take into account, like when
> > there is
> > just two hours in an evening to implement a feature, and the preliminary
> > design phase, when done right, would already take three hours -- what
> > then?
>
> Well - I spend most of my time in the commercial software world, where the
> answer is either suck it up and do what you can in 2 hours - or convince
> the powers that be for an extension.
>
> For an open-source project, where there usually isn't as much pressure to
> release before it's ready, I'd say that the answer is to spend 2 or 3 weeks
> instead of one - or to find someone else interested to help...
>
> I tend to agree with a lot of the items in the article - I think the core
> problem is that a lot of people don't find design (code or UI) as
> interesting as the actual coding - so they are more likely to just spend
> the majority of their time on the 'fun stuff'.

It's not time that's the problem. If I spend more time on designing an 
interface it could be worse in the end.

See Celeste's blog: "4. Usability is hard to measure."

I'm not an artist, but as a Krita developer I might be one of the "power 
users". So it's hard to tell if a feature is usable or not.

Also I know only half a dozen Krita users and they all have a computer science 
background, so not really our target users 
(http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kimageshop/2006-July/004642.html)
If you ask them how the Krita UI could be better they always want a more 
powerful interface (btw. the most common answers were "Better jpeg save 
dialog" and performance).