A reply to Eric Ramond's article, The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story:

pcCorrect?Eric:Mr. Raymond;

Interesting article. I've been following your work for some time now, but this article, I thought, didn't go far enough up the dumb tree:

> I click "New". Up pops a wizard that says, in big friendly letters, "Add a new print queue".

Your basic user, anyone <= an MCSE, will plotz when they see the word 'queue.' I believe you smacked the spike on the noggin when you stated that the one thing MS gets right is the user interface. Since newbs are usually trying Linux in an effort to get away from Billy Bob and his Micro$haft, wouldn't it behoove Open Source designers to just duplicate the MS user path through the setup dialogues (and/or the rest of the GUI). MS does spend vast amounts on interface testing, so why reinvent the wheel? Read "can't afford to do the testing." So...

>New>Network Printer>Name of Computer where printer attached>...

I think your guidelines at the end of the article are great! The main thing missing from mainstreaming Open Source software is end user testing, is it not? Bad GUI's are the symptom, geekly idealism is the cause. If we tested as we should, we may even come up with a better nav model than WIMP, but we'd at least be on a par.

I believe some of this is still down to snobbery. If developers make a very sophisticated package accessible to every monkey's uncle's dog with a mouse, they feel they're detracting from the tens of thousands of hours in front of a terminal they spent getting to where they sit with too much unpaid time on their hands. And why should they make it easy for the unwashed duffi (Pay your dues, man.), when it wasn't easy for them. Puhlease... (I agree, BTW, but that don't keep the shine on my shoes.) Get over it! "If you build it, they will come." But if it's hard to use, they'll go right back to their comfy U-Haul in Smokey Mountains ;-/

Carey

BTW - Go here: Jakob Neilson's Usablity Site