Usability

An article "40+ Suggestions for a Better Desktop" discusses how to extend recent desktops to improve their usability. Ideas in this article cover a wide range of desktop applications, e.g. Nautilus, multimedia, spreadsheets, mail clients, configuration, security...

The article is intended for developers of those applications but users could discuss these ideas so developers will know what a users wants.

Matthew Thomas discusses his experience with Ubuntu Linux. Meanwhile, he points out the problems with the famous distribution, which by default uses GNOME. Most of his concerns apply to GNOME as well. Read the full article.

Reading over GNOME's desktop-devel mailing list and KDE's Dot News, I stumbled across two sets of user interface and satisfaction surveys that inquire into users think about GNOME and KDE's offerings. The organization performing the inquiry is the Human Aspects of Software Engineering (HASE) group over at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

I have to be candid in saying that I am surprised to see that a link to the surveys never made it here to, so I am including the links below for those who are interested in participating:

• GNOME Survey
• KDE Survey

Free and open source software is often criticised for being less usable than its commercial equivalent. Good user interface design isn't some magical thing that FOSS developers can't do for themselves, however. Benjamin Roe has written a short article describing five key points of good interface design that any developer can use in their projects. (Note: hosted on a slow connection, please use the Coral Cache if possible). Gnome's usability is discussed there among Firefox and Konqueror.

Calum Benson wrote:
You probably all know by now, but v2.0 of the HIG was released a few
weeks ago, albeit without a great deal of fanfare.

With the recent interesting discussion about naming conventions on Gnome, Dennis Heuer wrote another opinion piece on the subject.
Also, an AG sends in: "Console and desktop shaking hands II" The author published a new approach to the subject . It is appended to the first part, see the comment section.

Version 2.0 of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines have been released. Calum Benson writes:

"If you go down to the HIG today, you're in for a big surprise... well, a mild double-take, perhaps. The official HIG version is now 2.0, which will hopefully signify the start of a more frequent update regime.

Once you get over the inevitable excitement, you'll probably realise it's more of a 1.2 than a 2.0, but hey-- we have to get people to read it somehow :)"

I've done a little survey of Fitt's law compliance in GNOME.Many computer users do not have good mouse control. Fitt's law is one of the principles of Human-Computer Interaction that helps us take this into consideration when designing user interfaces. Although its statement, "the time required to acquire a target is a function of the size of the target and its distance from the current pointer location" sounds obvious, it's amazing how often the law is ignored. One special case makes the law non-trivial: the screen is modeled as an infinite surface, and the edges of the screen are considered extend unto infinity in the respective directions. The 4 corners are the 4 easiest pixels of the screen to reach, because you can "throw" your mouse at them. Not only does this provide a horizon of stability for those whose mouse movements are like a ship thrashing in a chaotic ocean, it also greatly increases the efficiency of users with good mouse control. So the aim must be to populate the edges of the screen with as many UI elements as possible.

I've written an article outlining three proposals for more intuitive file management in GNOME.

File management today is a lot more cumbersome than it needs to be. The computer science undergrad learns the "In UNIX, everything is a file" philosophy and is blown away by the beauty of it. However, this world-view is not well suited for a user-interface. "Beauty" is not the description that springs to mind. "Kludge" is more like it.

Spatial nautilus is an admirable step in the right direction: it discards the filesystem approach and adopts the folder-as-an-object metaphor. But there's a lot more to do.

Many people are still getting (by whatever means) the core MS fonts for their Linux Desktop. This project is meant to be as a replacement for some of these main fonts. They have been designed to match similarly with the fonts they replace. The fonts are derived from the Bitstream Vera fonts and are available under the same terms as Vera.

This pack is the Arkpandora font set.

They can be found at:

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/gavindi/

The "It's Soup, Come and Get It" release.

Go get them from http://www.gnome.org/fonts for your greater viewing pleasure.

Please read the release notes; not that yesterday's note was not all correct; the release notes has corrected information.

Jim Gettys wrote:
We're sorry it has taken a bit longer than expected. Feedback during beta
test was that people wanted less leading (less line separation). Jim Lyles
was kind enough to redesign Vera's accents to make this possible, but this
was more work than originally planned for.

Aaron J. Seigo of the KDE project announces:

Seth Nickell (GNOME Usability Project), Havoc Pennington (Free Desktop,
GNOME), and JP Schnapper-Casteras (Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group)
and myself have been discussing the possibility of co-locating the KDE and
GNOME Human Interface Guides (HIGs).