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Free software scares normal people

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#401

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

The mistake is in trying to understand the business case. There is nothing to understand! The business case is the aggregate of what people actually do. There is no proper procedure that's actually followed at the ground level. Workflows are emergent and in constant flux. In this environment, the role of a dev should not be to build internal products, but to deliver internal hacks and ad-hoc solutios, maintain them, modify on the fly, and keep it all documented.

I.e. done right, it should be not just possible but completely natural for a random team lead in the mail room to call IT and ask, "hey, we need a yellow highlighter in the sheet for packages that Steve from ACME Shipping needs to pick on extra evening run, can you add it?", and the answer should be "sure!" and they should have the new feature within an hour.

Yes, YOLO development straight on prod is acceptable. It's what everyone else is doing all the time, in every aspect of the business. It's time for developers to stop insisting they're special and normal rules don't apply to them.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#402

Post by jampekka »

askonomm wrote: post #27
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 Gnome tells people that they should just know keyboard shortcuts for everything - which is literally something only power users know to do. Their entire design ethos is a weird opposition to itself where it is aiming to be so simple and minimal that in order to do basic things you have to memorize keyboard shortcuts as there is no visual interface possibility to do those things.

Where do they tell to use keyboard shortcuts? I've been using Gnome 3 since it came out and I haven't encountered situations where I could do things with keyboard I couldn't do easily with mouse.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#403

Post by thyristan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #393
marcus_holmes wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This usually comes back to maker time vs manager time. If you want a developer to write good code quickly, put them in an isolated silo and don't disturb them. If you want a developer to engage with the business units more, be prepared for their productivity to drop sharply. As with all things in tech, it's a trade-off.

I think that's the lesser problem. The bigger problem is the attitude of IT is wrong from the start. When they start doing something, they want to Do It Right. They want to automate the business process. But that's the wrong goal! You can spend years doing that and go all the way to building a homegrown SAP, and it will still suck and people will still use their half-assed Excel sheets and Access hacks. IT should not…

> They should focus on streamlining actual workflow of actual people.

If you streamline a shitty process, you will have diarrhea...

Unfortunately, most processes suck and need improvement. It isn't actually IT's job to improve processes. But almost always, IT is the only department that is able to change those processes nowadays since they are usually tied to some combination of lore, traditions, spreadsheets and misused third-party software.

If you just streamline what is there, you are cementing those broken processes.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#404

Post by miki123211 »

squeedles wrote: post #10

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…

To design a good user interface, you need a feedback loop that tells you how people actually use your software. That feedback loop should be as painless for the user as possible.

Having people to man a 1-800 number is one way to get that feedback loop. Professional user testing is another. Telemetry / analytics / user tracking, or even being able to pull out statistics from a database on your server, is yet another. Professional software usually has at least two of these, sometimes all four. Free software usually has none.

There are still FLOSS developers out there who think that an English-only channel on Libera.chat (because Discord is for the uneducated n00bs who don't know what's good for them) is a good way to communicate with their users.

What developers want from software isn't what end users want from software. Take Linux for example. A lot of things on Linux can only be done in the terminal, but the people who are able to fix this problem don't actually need it to be fixed. This is why OSS works so well for dev tools.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#405

Post by KronisLV »

> It’s a bit like obscuring the less-used functions on a TV remote with tape. The functions still exist if you need them, but you’re not required to contend with them just to turn the TV on.

For telling software devs to embrace traditional design wisdom, using TV remotes is an interesting example - cause aside from the commonly used functionality people actually care about (channels, volume, on/off, maybe subtitles/audio language) the rest should just be hidden under a menu and the fact that this isn't the case demonstrates bad design.

It's probably some legacy garbage, along the lines of everyone having an idea for what a TV remote is "supposed" to look like and therefore the manufacturers putting on buttons in plain view that will never get used and that you'd sometimes need the manual to even understand.

At the same time, it might also be possible that the FOSS software that's made for power users or even just people with needs that are slightly more complex than the baseline is never going to be suited for a casual user - for example, dumbing down Handbrake and hiding functionality power users actually do use under a bunch of menus would be really annoying for them and would slow them down.

You can try to add "simple" and "advanced" views of your UI, but that's the real disconnect here - different users. Building simplified versions with sane defaults seems nice for when there is a userbase that needs it.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#406

Post by moring »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #49
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.

I'm optimistic that the rise of vibe coding will allow the people who understand the user's wants and needs to fix the world's FOSS UIs.

I'm sceptical about fixing (in the sense of a lasting solution), but it might be a very powerful tool to communicate to devs what the UI should look like.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#407

Post by jampekka »

einpoklum wrote: post #386
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…

> 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

One could say the same about people who don't bother to learn ffmpeg CLI.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#408

Post by fragmede »

mjevans wrote: post #363
fragmede wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a touchpad? Use two fingers to scroll (also works horizontally). Who's managing to hit a tiny scrollbar that disappears with a touchpad‽

They just aren't as good at detecting real physical contact as a nice physical mouse is at responding to movement and pressure.

I mean, maybe but the question wasn't what is the superior general pointing device (trackball ftw if you ask me) though, but how to scroll using a trackpad without tearing your hair out.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#409

Post by pepoluan »

I think some software -- FLOSS or otherwise -- tries to do this by hiding functionalities behind an "Advanced Mode" toggle.

Which kind of fulfills the best of both worlds: Welcoming for beginners, but full-powered for advanced users.

More software should be designed this way.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#410

Post by eviks »

aniforprez wrote: post #396
eviks wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the "modal disruption" is misguided - he cites as the challenge a very poor implementation in a MS app where the modes were barely visible!!! That's not a proof that modes are bad, just a statement that invisible information makes it hard for the users to adapt! Brushes (another mode he cites as great) are great precisly because their state is immediately visible in your focus area - your primary pointer changes Now…

Having actually used Audacity, the modes were horrid and not at all intuitive to use and everything demonstrated in the video only looked like vast improvements (aside from the logo). I am failing to see how adding handles wastes space that could be used for any extra information especially when the tradeoff is an incredible degree of customisation for my UI. In terms of precision, they're working on accessibility is…

> I am failing to see how adding handles wastes space that could be used for any extra information

What is there to see? You add a bar that takes space. That space can be taken up by something useful. Just like you have apps that hide app title bar and app menus so you can have more space for your precious content. This is especially useful for high-info-density apps like these audio/video/photo authoring ones. Note how tiny those handles are in the video, why do you think that is?

> tradeoff is an incredible degree of customisation

You don't have that tradeoff, neither of the 2 solutions are anywhere close to "incredible customization", so you can pick either without it.

> In terms of precision, they're working on accessibility issues

Working towards what magic solution?

> but I'm not sure how this change is any special than any other UI.

why does it have to be special? Just a bog standard degradation common to any UI (re)design, nothing special about it.

> the modes were horrid

Of course they were. Just like they were horrid in that MS Paint app the dev worked on before. But you can make any UI primitive horrid, even buttons, that's no reason to remove them, but to improve them!

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