In a world where we’re handing over gazillions of dollars to software publishers like Microsoft, Adobe and Macromedia… er, Microsoft and Adobe… there’s a brave alternative that’s actually kicking serious ass: open-source software. And it’s all free for the downloading.
Despite some notable successes — most notably the Linux operating system and Firefox — the open-source movement has long been baffled by the failure of the world to cease flinging money at the software giants.
One hint might be the fact that, anxious to find a sexy acronym to describe open-source software, the aforementioned community borrowed a little French… and came up with Free/Libre Open Source Software, or F.L.O.S.S. I guess it’s an improvement on Building Really Open Communities Creating Objectively Lovely Interfaces, or B.R.O.C.C.O.L.I. But not by much.
With Firefox, though, the community has started getting canny. There’s an actual marketing campaign behind the thing. (It won me over.) And they’re starting to get serious about one of the major obstacles to adopting open-source software: the fact that, stable and functional and brilliant as it might be, it’s often absolutely freakin’ cryptic to the everyday people trying to use it.
Well, good news. There’s another gang that’s joining the rumble: usability experts, including Rashmi Sinha:
These are the nascent days for open source usability and it is worth reflecting on what the problem is, why open source software is so hard to use, why designers and usability practitioners don’t work on such projects and how all this can change.
For anyone who has struggled through an installation of OpenOffice, or tried to navigate through the official web site of (insert name of nearly any open-source project here), this is nothing but good news. Sinha’s post makes fascinating reading, and it’s tremendously encouraging — at least partly because she’s clear-eyed about not only the potential for improved usability, but the very real roadblocks it faces.
Just to get a taste for what it could mean, scroll down to Part 3 of her post and compare the new CivicSpace web site, redesigned with usability in mind, with sites for several other prominent open-source projects she links to. It’s kind of astonishing.
