It's not impossible...
..for an open source project to have a "coherent design philosophy" and produce usable software. I'm disagreeing with Don Norman here.We just haven't figured it out yet
One of the critiques that's stuck with me from Twidale & Nichols analysis of the Mozilla community is the weak way in which it proposes and prototypes UI development. I'm less critical of ASCII art than say the Netscape UI team, but enabling easy prototyping within the bug tracking system for Mozilla would be a good step. The clunky bitmap based specs of the Netscape UI team are no better -- XUL development is rapid and more likely to ensure accurate translation to production, why not use it?
The Mozilla development community has also, whether by lack of resources, direction, or perceptibility, managed to show blatant disregard for top usability glitches. I'm thinking in particular of the "New Folder" dialog in bookmarks which spawned with the phrase New Folder written in the textbox but unhighlighted. This resulted in totally unecessary user select/delete operations.
Technically, this arose out of a abstraction layer for dialogs not supporting selecting the contents of it's prompt box. Functionally, use cases present at the design of the abstraction layer would have pointed out the problem. Resource wise, this may still not have been enough -- introduction of usability analysis into the review/super review process could help, but it's a fine line between review and the "design dictator".
Frankly, I've gotten to play design dictator in some significant projects. It's a rewarding role, but too much of a bottleneck for the massively parallel world of open source.|||
Posted at NaN:NaN, Published in: Mozilla UI
