Customization and usability

[regretfulfanboy]

I have not made an academic study of usability but there are a few things I have noticed from personal observation. I like being able to customize computer programs to suit my needs. This is where the open source projects really shine. The Apple widgets, Google gadgets, Firefox extensions and dozens of other open source projects are seeking to

Comments

[borkencode]

Adium is based on the code behind GAIM (now called Pidgin). In an ideal world all IMing would be done over a protocol similar to Jabber, which is what runs Google Chat and the LJ chat thing nobody uses. One useful feature of it which is rarely turned on, is the ability for server interconnects. If this were used everywhere, you could simply give out a username@foo.com jabber address and anyone could IM you from their friend@bar.com account. Alas it is not so.

As for Microsoft's Office suite, my favorite anecdote about that is that most of the feature requests that they receive are for features already in the program, but people don't know how to access them. I can't really disparage Microsoft for their interface, they've worked quite a bit to improve it. The problem is that there's a lot of functionality in there, 90% of which is never used by the average user, and thus should be somewhat hidden away. Of course the 10% that uses $obscure_feature want it to be quite visible, this leads to the menus that change based on what you use, which leads to users getting confused and frustrated because "where did that thing go, it was here the last time I wanted to use it" syndrome kicks in.

The problem with usability in the software industry partly comes from the immense cost of doing usability studies, which many small software companies can't afford, and the large ones (like Microsoft) have large programs (like Word) with more features and so they still end up a clusterfuck. Free software is usually notorious for its poor usability and just plain ugliness. Most free software projects come about from personal use, where the programmer knows exactly how the program works, thus there are no usability issues for him. The Linux movement is really working on this though, and I expect Linux to be one of the most user friendly operating systems in a few years (although it'll still be all workhorse underneath).