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Free software scares normal people

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#381

Post by savolai »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #354
loki-ai wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more often than not it’s the development team that skips engaging with users, putting in minimal effort to understand their real needs. most of these teams only wants a straightforward spec, shut themselves off from distractions, just to emerge weeks or months later with something that completely misses the business case. and yet, they will find ways to point fingers at the product owner, project manager, or client f…

I have met the occasional person like this, sure. But only ever in really large organisations where they can hide, and only a minority. The huge majority of devs want to understand the business and develop high quality software for it. In one business I worked for, the devs knew more about the actual working of the business than most of the non-IT staff. One of the devs I worked with was routinely pulled into high-le…

And yet, even ”knowing about the working of the business” is different from actually understanding user needs at UI level, which involves a lot more variables.

The single most valuable tool is user testing. However it really takes quite a few rounds of actually creating a design and seeing how wrong you saw the other person’s capabilities, to grok how powerful user testing is in revealing your own biases.

And it’s not hard at all at core. The most important lesson really is a bit of humility. Actually shutting up and observing what real users do when not intervened.

Shameless plug, my intro to user testing: https://savolai.net/ux/the-why-and-the-how-usability-testing...

Re: Free software scares normal people

#382

Post by einpoklum »

His notion of "normal people" are people who use MacOS:

> Normal people often struggle with converting video. ... the format will be weird. (Weird, broadly defined, is anything that won’t play in QuickTime or upload to Facebook.)"

Except normal people don't use MacOS and don't even know what QuickTime is. Including the US, the MacOS user share is apparently ~11%. Take the US out, and that drops to something like... 6%, I guess? And Macs are expensive - prohibitively expensive for people in most countries. So, normal people use Windows I'm afraid.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

In fact, if you disregard the US, Linux user share seems to be around half of the Mac share, making the perspective of "normal people use Macs not FOSS" even sillier.

-----

PS - Yes, I know the quality of such statistics is low, if you can find better-quality user share analysis please post the link.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#384

Post by einpoklum »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #4

Some reasons for this: 1. Free software is developed for the developer's own needs and developers are going to be power users. 2. The cost to expose options is low so from the developer's perspective it's low effort to add high value (perceiving the options as valuable). 3. The developer doesn't know who the customer is and rather than research/refine just tries to hit all the boxes. 4. The distribution of the softwa…

> . Free software is developed for the developer's own needs and developers are going to be power users

* Free software which gains popularity is developed for the needs of many people - the users who make requests and complaints and the developers.

* Developers who write for a larger audience naturally think of more users' needs. It's true that they typically cater more to making features available than to simplicity of the UI and ease of UX.

> 2. The cost etc.

Agreed!

> 3. The developer doesn't know who the customer is and rather than research/refine just tries to hit all the boxes.

The developer typically knows what the popular use cases would be. Like with the handbrake example. They also pretty much know how newbie users like simplified workflows and hand-holding - but it's often a lot of hassle to create the simplified-with-semi-hidden-advanced-mode interface.

> 4. The distribution of the software itself means anyone who successfully installs it themselves really is a power user

Are people who install, say, the Chrome browser on their PC to be considered power userS? They downloaded and installed it themselves after all... no, I believe you're creating a false dichotomy. Some users will never install anything; some users might install common software they've heard about from friends; and some might actively look for software to install - even though they don't know much about it or about how to operate the apps and OS facilities they already h ave. ... and all of these are mostly non-power-users.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#385

Post by ozim »

nradov wrote: post #343
marcus_holmes wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have nightmare stories to tell of Access Forms from my time dealing with them in the 90's. The usual situation is that the business department hires someone with a modicum of talent or interest in tech, who then uses Access to build an application that automates or helps with some aspect of the department's work. They then leave (in a couple of cases these people were just interns) and the IT department is then cal…

Of course this is ultimately the IT department's own fault for not responding quickly enough to legitimate business requirements. They need to actively look for ways to help rather than processing tickets.

Downside is that it quickly turns to idea people coming over directly to dev team pushing BS ideas and requiring work to be done on that ASAP.

You need a structure if you have org of 100+ employees. If it is smaller than that I don’t believe you get dev department.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#386

Post by einpoklum »

advisedwang wrote: post #20

Meanwhile, every time Gnome makes UI adjustments along these lines, there's an outcry that it's dumbed downed, copying apple, removing features etc etc.

Well, the outcry is completely justified. Suppose a video conversion app really did have just have a drop-target area and a "do it" button. It would be ridiculously bad. That kind of crutch is ok to install for illiterate users who don't know anything and won't learn anything - but:

1. Some day, those users think "Hey, I'm not happy with some setting, what do I do?" and they can do nothing.

2. The users who need more functionality can't get it - and feel like they have to constantly wrestle with the app, and that it constantly confounds and trips them up, even when they express their clear intents. It's not like the GNOME apps have a "simple mode" and an "advanced mode"

3. The GNOME apps don't even really go along those lines. You see, even non-savvy users enjoy consistentcy and clarity; and the GNOME people have made their icons inscrutable; take over the window manager's decorations to "do their own thing"; hide items behind a hamburger menu, as though you're on a mobile phone with no screen space; etc. So, even for the non-savvy users - the UX is kind of bad. And just think of things like the GTK file picker. Man, that's a little Pandora's box right there, for the newbie and power user alike.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#387

Post by LtWorf »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #306
LtWorf wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixe…

I created localslackirc to keep using IRC and not have to deal with slack :D

Re: Free software scares normal people

#388

Post by csin »

array_key_first wrote: post #277
zeroq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> contributors of free software tend to be power users or, simply put, nerds it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.

They're not just nerds, they're power users. These are different things. Pretty much everyone is a power user of SOME software. That might be Excel, that might be their payroll processor, that might be their employee data platform. Because you have to be if you work a normal desk job. If Excel was simpler and had an intuitive UI, it would be worthless. Because simple UI works for the first 100 hours, maybe. Then it's…

"If Excel was simpler and had an intuitive UI, it would be worthless."

Excel is a simple intuitive UI.

I use 10% of Excel. I don't even know the 90% of what it's capable of.

It hides away it's complexity.

For people that need the complex stuff, they can access it via menus/formulas.

For the rest of us, we don't even know it's there.

Whereas, Handbrake shoves all the complexity in your face. It's overwhelming for first time users.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#389

Post by LtWorf »

sjamaan wrote: post #366
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What pisses me off is that the “brutalist” style in the 1990s was arguably perfect. Having standardized persistent menus, meaningful compact toolbars was nice. Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different. Websites also decided to avoid blue underline…

I was ranting exactly the same just yesterday. Nowadays UI designers seem to have forgotten all about affordances. Back in the day you had drop shadows below buttons to indicate that they could be pressed, big chunky scrollbars with two lines on the handle to indicate "grippiness" etc. A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, b…

I've had long discussions at work with our designer, who thinks that people on desktop computers should perform swipe actions with the mouse rather than the UI reacting to mouse scroll events.

99% of the users are not using the mobile version.

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