Critiquing Open Source UI

The following note was sent to the Microsoft UI Design discussion list the other day. As I agreed with the comments of the original poster (one Andrew McLaren by name) I thought that I would just copy them all here:

<quote who="Andrew McLaren">

Eric Raymond, self-appointed spokesperson for the Open Source movement, recently wrote a few articles complaining about the poor state of UI design in many open source projects. See for example

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html.

A superficial response to this might be "good, the Linux guys are admitting they have cruddy interfaces and that they need to lift their game". But John Gruber has written a much more devastating analysis of Raymond's comments:

http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability.

This scathing and insightful essay is full of good quotes; e.g.:

"This sort of task-driven interface is windows' forte ... they make these tasks approachable for [ordinary users]. And they're the result of a lot of work by a lot of well-paid full-time Microsoft engineers."

Okay we could take issue with the "well-paid" bit :-) - but anyways - and ...

"It's easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn... [but] do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?".

Gruber's core complaint is this: Raymond castigates Linux developers because they've done great fundamental software work, but then they've slackened off at the end, and not paid enough attention to that last little bit to make a project a success - the UI. Whereas, according to Gruber, good UI design is an intensive project in its own right, potentially much longer and harder than coding the inner logic and function. And structural aspects of open source militate against them ever getting good results, even if they did "put in that last little bit of effort."

Anyway Gruber's whole essay is a good read. I gather he is more of a Mac-oriented kinda guy; but I guess in this area, Apple and Microsoft have some common ground.

</quote>

I, also, definitely recommend both articles.