More Open Source Usability

I found a new entrant in the professional academic record on usability in open source from this year's CHI conference via MM-P.

Alas, I also discovered one of the most disappointing public Mozilla discussions I've encountered in a while over at m-zine.  In the discussion thread, a user offers a recount of his top bug picks. The response is typical and the equivalent of a racial slur in the open source world:

• So you gonna fix those bugs?

The act of delving into bugzilla and tracking feature development and bug fixes is a non-trivial task.  Mozilla.org has long valued "bug triagers" who monitor for duplicates and bug accuracy.  The huge presence of duplicates is a sign of the inefficiency of user feedback in the project, but that's not my focus today. Users who are willing to provide feedback in the context of existing bug reports should be valued not chastised.

The bug list post in this thread was not especially useful with a blanket "this would make Outlook Express users feel more at home".  A subsequent account of "Aunt Tillie" trying to use the Thunderbird mail account snafu is invaluable, or would be, if a significant number of people chimed in about their experiences introducing users to Mozilla software.

However, when vitriolic commentary shuts down user feedback on experience on the software products something is deeply wrong.  Even in open source, the user is still the customer.  Deleting features, or a natural selection process of over-implementing and pruning, is not the answer to usability.  Up front needs analysis, user profiling, and data collection about existing usage and pain points is the answer to designing the right features in the first place.  It's also still the answer in iterative design.

With the new open source implementation of a logging system at uzilla.mozdev, we may finally bring usage logging to Mozilla development.
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Posted at 8:17