Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Why Indeed, Awkward Software

Why Awkward Software?.  Robert Chassell asks why usability and the human factors around use of, say GNU/Linux, aren't being addressed by the big-company supporters like IBM.  I don't know either, although I can tell you that it will take a while.

I lived with the DB2 personal edition for about 8 weeks and discovered that attention to installation lifecycle and learning curve of the user is not addressed very well, and this is presumably a mature product.  The only worse recent experience was applying SQL Server security patches to the copy of MSDE that is installed with Microsoft Office Extensions.

I'm not sure how one can drown out the geek echo long enough to figure out what works for the rest of the people.  Most geekware is not anything I want to put in the spotlight either.  We should stop assuming software is designed any better for geeks than for anyone else.  Maybe producing graceful software simply requires a higher level of skill and attention and, most of all, a commitment to genuine, measurable usability by the intended community of users.  That probably requires more practice at simply looking, listening, and asking.  Refusing to make it up would be particularly nice.
posted by Dennis at 5/20/2004 08:48:15 AM