…and come with me back to the summer of 2004.  It was a time of hope, a time of potential change.  Just like the 2008 American elections, or the election of New Labour after living under the Torys for so long, the future looked bright and full of promise.

So what was this event you may ask?  In a nutshell, large portions of the Linux, and FOSS, community realised they had a usability problem and looked like they were starting to take it seriously.  It was largely triggered by this post, The Luxury of Ignorance by Eric S Raymond (and part 2) and although he didn’t say anything that hundreds of people were not already saying, for such a heavyweight of the FOSS community to say such things was unheard of.  Everyone was pretty much forced to sit up and take notice.  For a while you could even suggest in public that Linux was seriously lacking in usability and only be flamed to a partial crisp.

Many Open Source Usability cottage projects sprang up, and several large projects announced that they were putting usability to the forefront – I distinctly remember a quote from Gnome stating they were putting usability at the centre of their effort.  It was meant to be a new dawn of user friendly FOSS.

That was five years ago.  So what went wrong?

The nail was, amusingly, hit pretty much on the head almost immediately by John Gruber with his article Ronco Spray-on Usability in which he makes my first point, and to quote:

UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between:

• software that performs function X; and
• software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface

isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work.

Which is exactly true.  You cannot code leaky crap in C and expect to easily fix it later, you cannot easily retrofit security as an afterthought (ask Microsoft about that one), so why the belief that usability is just a theme-pack away?

Anyway, there’s been a five year wait, which is a literal ice-age in terms of computing – why the lack of progress?  There is a simple answer:

Programmers for FOSS projects are largely not interested in usability.

The simply proof for this is that if they were, it wouldn’t be a problem.  The majority of good programmers I know are not programmers because they picked it in university because they thought it would make them money, but were in fact born programmers.  It’s almost a calling – and I know this because I started when I was 8.

However the sheer fact that a ‘call to arms’ is even necessary demonstrates how little interest their really is.  Which brings me to my second point on why so little has been achieved:

All the effort on fixing usability has been aimed at making the FOSS developers better at usability rather than trying to involve the people who actually know about it.

The unfortunate ethos of the FOSS movement appears to be ‘The Programmer is King’.  Unless you are personally willing to fork the project and code it youself, the chances of having any input on anything, irrespective of ability, is pretty much zero.  Even the attempts at engaging non-developers suffer the same fate

Adventures in Failure

Every now and then I forget this key point (do it yourself or GTFO) and stupidly try to ‘contribute’, the last time being a couple of years ago on the run up to the Hardy launch (moving forward in time a few years).  Again it was another time of optimism and there was a call for non-developers (the ridiculous thing about all this is I am a developer.  Full time.  Paid) to help contribute to the Ubuntu art team.  Now I am not amazing at graphic design, but passable, and have spent quite a few years doing it as I realised I had an interest.

Since I whinge a lot about what should be done I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and give it a bash and maybe help do some good.

So I signed up to the mailing list, created a very basic (but indicative of the direction I wanted to go in) design and started posting (first design ever is here).  A few people liked it, a few people hated it, I received a bit of feedback, acted on it, and posted again.  As this cycle continued though and as I saw many people much more talented than me post work, get comments, then disappear I realised something surprising: Nobody with any actual authority over anything was bothering to read the mailinglist or look at the wiki.

You’ll remember the launch of Hardy and the exciting new theme culminating in a fancy wallpaper – It had nothing to do with the quality of the submissions.  Rather than as in every single professional design project I have worked on where several concepts are submitted, whittled down to a few and then to one, it was clear that this process was never going to happen since there was nobody at the wheel who was going to make the initial choices.

I never received any feedback from anybody official on my work, and the bulk of feedback was solicited by spamming various Linux forums with links asking for opinions.  Again if this was a professional business I was dealing with who were paying me to do it I would be told Yes/No and given reasons for the decision from which point I would either go back to the drawing board or work on addressing the issues raised and thus be able to move forwards.  Alas, nobody was at the wheel and all you could hear was the sound of crickets.  As a result it’s impossible to improve as there is no indication of *what* needs improved.

I started pushing the issue after a while as the deadline for Hardy was a few months away and even if my design was not considered (I didn’t really expect it to be), at least someone else’s would have been that I could have helped out on – I was willing at this point to learn how to do some theming too.  But again, there was no official decision or feedback.

Soon into this discussion it was made clear that if I wanted my design to be considered I should ‘Make a theme out of it and post it on Gnome look’.  So what started as a campaign to involve non-developers in Ubuntu – and bear in mind this is just a skin-job and not even touching the usability elephant in the room – turned into a ‘learn to program, we’re not going to do it for you’.  I was pretty much expected to sink dozens of hours of my time into creating a theme, adding it to an already massive list and then hoping the Ubuntu devs spot it on the off chance that they actually look through that site.

Ultimately Linux development is only for those that 1: have the time and 2: are programmers, and despite the lip service they pay to usability and design, the focus on a developer-centric solution to every problem is simply not yielding any results.