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Leading Open Source Desktop???
by Gil on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @02:30
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"As the leading Open Source desktop"
Can we really be making statements like this? I don't recall seeing proof of this anywhere, and in direct contradiction to this statement, it seems like we're getting trounced by Gnome on the business desktop. I wish the authors of articles with opinions such as these would think a little before making such sweeping statements.
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1st impression counts
by Holler on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @03:58
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It is more "look and feel".
Usually the usability problem is that text is cut or the widget are not fixed. You could see it in the desktop settings dialog, all tabbed setting panels had a different size, so the main window resizes.
Another issue is the lack of example files. When you first start a program you want to play around a little bit. So good example files are needed, a birthday card printout.
And of course a mature "theme manager" is needed.
It is not always easy to find the features, it was very difficult for me to remove a top Macstyle bar. when this feature is enabled often applications pop up so you cannot get them with the mouse anymore.
Program descriptions are sometimes unusable for newbies. What's a po file editor good for. The description does not help you.
I would suggest a talkback option for KDE test installations with an event logging. So you can analyse what was done by a newbie. Which options were used and how often. Put in in a datawarehosue and then analyse the user behaviour.
Or start certain difficult cases and look how it is done by the user.
More complicated things like "format a floppy disc" or write a letter and save it to a memory stick.
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Great news!
by Tom Chance on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @03:58
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As someone who has been on the kde-usability mailing list for some time, this sounds like excellent news. The usability process is in desparate need of some formalisation, sicne at the moment the list is a barrage of opinions and not very much research.
It will still, no doubt, be useful to have many of the discussions already going on on the kde-usability list; a lot of good ideas have been dreamt up and worked on there. But it will also be good to get a sense of direction and policy from a more professional body of opinion.
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Mailing list
by Holler on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @04:03
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Mailman support of Kmail has to improve. KMail shall be able to analyse automatic response mails by the list and be able to automatic forward your subscription password to KWallet. Automatic folder creation, automatic subsription, I would like to see a "one-click" mailing list subscription.
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Application/UI Design Review Site
by Will Stokes on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @05:48
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This is most interesting news. I have recently been mulling proposing starting a new kde/qt site which offers reviews of application user interfaces at a very early stage in development (aka before milestones are reached). I think we are finding the design flaws in applications when it is too late, and as a result considerable extra effort is involved fixing UI's up compared to the work corporate competitors must go through if they do pay attention to such detail. All the same, my idea is not orthogonal to this news and I'll outline it here and see what feedback it gets.
I propose we construct a web site which provides reviews of KDE and Qt applications as early stages of their development cycles. Teams of reviewers would review submitted applications and provide a single review which covers a set of points providing constructive critisim. This process is similar to that which takes place when papers are submitted to journals for publication. By having multiple people review an application, then get together and combine their reactions into a single review, noise in the data is averaged out. You don't get those "I love KDE, it's so great, everything in this new version is an improvement" or "KDE sucks. Gnome rules! Troll on!!" reviews this way. Furthermore, all criticism should come with constructive suggestions. For example, I dislike the clutter in Konqueror's menu system, but if I were writing a review of Konq I would sketch out and scan in, or whip up in Qt Designer an alternative organization of menu entries. As a developer, critism of my work is nice, but suggestions of method for improvment is so much more helpful. The obvious question is will this work? As a developer of an open source app (Album Shaper) I would LOVE to get constructive critisim from a larger audience. Currently all user interface feedback I get from asking people I live with for their ideas. Furthermore, I would be intersted in review other software and giving authors ideas for better layout and interaction with their applications. What is more interesting is that reviewers ideally are nonprogrammers IMHO. Thus we can pull in a large resource that currently is unable to provide constructive feedback without getting too involved.
What do people think? If I get some feedback on this idea I'll see if I can make it happen by sending it to a few of the higher ups in the kde community. I strongly believe this resource should be provided to all KDE and QT applications. Qt applications are cross platform and are the first glimpse many computer users will first have of open source development at its best, all the more reason to impress them, then lure then to KDE. :)
Please respond!
Will Stokes, Album Shaper maintainer (http://albumshaper.sf.net)
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KDE style should have attention as well
by will on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @07:18
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It is good that KDE tries to take usability seriously, but I am slightly skeptical. Out of experience from what I have seen here and on the mailinglists the developers
a) Are in general opposed to do the needed changes
b) Lack the needed understanding and vision pursue such goals
Changes do happen, but reluctantly, and only with a lot of kicking and screaming. Gnome do indeed have the right vision and seems to be genuinly committed do needed changes. So my guess is that KDE will never be able to catch up, and as Gnome gets technically better, it will be the winner of the desktop wars. With hindsight history will probably say that it has already won at this point.
But that was actually the semi-trolling part (is it trolling if it is sincerly meant?). What I really had to say is that style is a different element that needs attention. The KDE desktop has a visual style communicates with geeks and engineers. The style should communicate to the mainstream user and her values. That would mean friendlier, more elegant, and more informative application names, style-elements that speaks to the office workers; it should convey an impression of friedliness, empowerment and ease of use. Another part of style is general cleanliness and harmonization of fonts, proportions and styles.
I'm sure this is all sounds very abstract, but an idea would be to mail a few agencies for advertising or graphic design, or perhaps professors on the relevant academies, and ask for volunteer advice on how the desktop should look...
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USABILITY STUDY!!!
by buggy on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @08:27
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Doesn't anyone get the irony inherent in the phrase
"Suns usability study"?
From the folks that gave us CDE (jointly),
browser applets, the horrible Metal L&F, etc...
Gee! Good thing Gnome has those folks to point
to the right direction!
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Users and usability
by David Johnson on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @11:10
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"A message consistently received from those users has been that KDE's usability could be better."
I don't want to sound elitist here, but what the heck do users know about usability? Think about it. They are not usability experts. They may have a sense that the overall interface is somehow less than ideal, but they do not have the expertise to identify the real problems or submit correct solutions.
Users are going to request interface changes not on the basis of usability, but on the basis of their personal familiarity. If they're familiar with Windows, then their requests are going to be based on the Windows interface, which is a poor example of usability.
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Now THAT's WHAT I WANT TO HEAR!
by Alex on Thursday 19/Feb/2004, @19:22
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The weakest spot by far is usability, though I have to say I'm pleased that it was significantly improved in KDE 3.2 and that it's on the road to more rapid improvement.
I just hope I won't have many usability nightmares, like those with Khotkeys 2.
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Good Work!
by Dominic Chambers on Friday 20/Feb/2004, @02:17
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Well done Aaron, this sounds really promising.
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More refinement and testing needed
by Lars on Friday 20/Feb/2004, @14:59
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KDE usability actually isn't *that* bad, and in my opinion Gnome, Windows and Mac all have their problems too.
MS Word is a good example of bad usability - despite widespread use and familiarity, few users can get it to behave correctly. MacOS 7 was a good example of usability - very simple and yet techie users had some really neat keyboard shortcuts.
Oh, and I like the usability of Firefox/Thunderbird vs the original Mozilla.
This is all relevant; look around at what's out there, it's easy to get used to KDE, especially I suspect for developers. Windows XP is good for many users, and yet sometimes they achieve this by sacrificing security. Don't knock it, just try to better it - aim for the same usability without the security compromise, and see how close you get.
KDE needs simplification. I wouldn't mind if 3.3 had, if not a feature freeze, then a very high usability focus.
In Konqueror, if you select some text in a webpage and right-click, the menu has 14 items in it. That's a lot to look through if you just want to Copy. The Copy item is actually 'Copy Text', which is non-standard and less recognised than 'Copy', but the longer name is 'needed' because further down the menu is an option to copy the whole web page. Surely this latter one is out of context if you've highlighted some text?
If you select some text in a Kmail message and right-click, there are 19 items. None of them allow you to copy the text to the clipboard.
If most people have used Windows, and most other people have uses Mac apps, Mozilla, Open Office, etc. etc, then meeting their expections as much as possible *is* improving usability.
Also, the KDE Control Centre is horribly scary, and even as a seasoned Linux user I look at it and wonder if I can be bothered to go through so many pages. The Windows approach of having an 'Advanced' button is actually a good one here - but if you don't like it, maybe it would be best to come up with some other way to make it easy for the user to differentiate uncommon options from advanced.
Personally, I'd want to play with about a third of the options, and only dig deeper if I want something specific. For less advanced users, this would be more of a *need*.
There are other things too, but a lot of it would come down to cleaning up the look and feel further, lots of small refinements and efforts to make things more bug-free, fault-tolerant etc.
Please, let's have a seriously cleaner and more usable KDE 3.3... and any KDE developers who haven't used Windows XP extensively, I urge you to try and do so!
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Just to say something
by Maynard on Saturday 21/Feb/2004, @15:13
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If you are afraid of pain, you can not learn, and not progress. The guys behind GNOME were not afraid of pain when they started enforcing the HIG rules. They rubbed quite a few people the wrong way, but they are successful in that they have managed to make people change the way they do things. Now everyone who is developing for GNOME wants to follow their guidelines, because it makes things easier for them too.
Also, the rule enforcing one app per use is especially important. Take the Kedit, Kate situation. These are both very good apps, and there is a case to be made for including both of these in the DE, for some people at least. But if you are not a developer, you do not need these. So a choice needs to be made, and there will be pain.
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General Comments
by CrashedAgain on Saturday 21/Feb/2004, @16:16
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Just my two cents worth:
First, on this forum setup: In the 'Important Stuff' below, one of the items is:
>>Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads
Yet when I click on Reply, all the other comments are gone unless I'm folowing a specific thread. Makes it kinda difficult to quote other comments. Couldn't the forum be set up using frames or something? As it is, I have to have reply screen open in a new tab....good thing konqueror & mozilla have tabs.
>>On KDE & useability. IMHO KDE doesn't really have a 'useablity problem', it is the currently most useable Linux GUI available. The GIMP's unusual ui has a useability problem, KDE is pretty easy to get on to no matter what OS you're coming from. This is not to say it's perfect, there is room for improvement but generally it's pretty good. Holler's post ('1st impression counts, 19/Feb/2004) lists some good examples of where improvements are wanted.
The 'problem' is getting improvements happening.
It would appear 'will' (post 19/Feb/2004) has a point:
>>... developers
>>a) Are in general opposed to do the needed changes
>>b) Lack the needed understanding and vision pursue such goals
Lars (Friday 20/Feb/2004) gives the example of revising the drop-down Konqueror menus. A quick search of the bug list reveals that this has already been reported as Bug 53772 (and several others, with over 300 votes). Bug list reports it as a wishlist item and it is marked 'resolved'. How is it resolved?, I have just installed the latest KDE 3.2 & still it has the same problem?
For KDE (and Linux generally) to progress, issues like this are going to have to be taken seriously and dealt with. This is one of the few disadvantages of open source and particularly volunteer labor open source. In a closed source environment, 'Sales' or somebody with authority can identify a problem (big or small) and enforce a solution but with open source there is no authority structure. This forum may (probably will) help identify problem issues but who's going to see that they get fixed?
>>by Gil: "As the leading Open Source desktop" Can we really be making statements like this?
Yes. To be the best you must believe you are the best.
and finally
>>by David Johnson on Thursday 19/Feb/2004
>>I don't want to sound elitist here, but what the heck do users know about >>usability?
You can't be serious. A 'user' is the ultimate test. If the user can't use the product, what good is it?
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![[KDE Dot News]](http://www.kde.org/dot/Images/kdedotnews.gif)
Posted by Aaron J. Seigo on Wednesday 18/Feb/2004, @20:18