Sunday, December 01, 2002

Lots of things to think about in the working paper Usability and Open Source. One of my first reactions is to the suggestion that OS projects have a tendency toward "creeping featurism". Often this expresses itself as an array of preferences. Creeping featurism in preferences in the Mozilla project also seems to have stemmed from indecision in choices about methods of operation A solution to this problem is more user-support for learning and customizing the browser. Phoenix does this well with popup blocking by observing popups and offering to block further instances. This is a well received feature by all accounts -- the challenges may be greater elsewhere. As an aside to my reading, I tried a query in Mozilla's bugzilla on "usability". Interesting, there's an effort underway to collect more usage data, even if it is a Netscape serving aspect -- Netscape search. In another case, a critical mail/news feature for providing a sidebar free navigation system for folders has it's UI spec on an inaccessible Netscape intranet server. It's a shame, email is clearly a realm with lots of room for improvement and huge impact potential. 8:01:20 PM    comment

It's interesting to compare JJG's Visual Vocabulary for IA to the Diane Notation for task modeling. 5:12:44 PM    comment