[mythtv-users] Why Free Software has poor usability ?

Jerry Rubinow jerrymr at gmail.com
Thu Aug 7 22:44:09 UTC 2008


On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 09:06:14AM -0400, John Drescher wrote:
> > > They're basically trying to make a work-alike for a version of
> > > Microsoft Office *that everyone knows how to use* at this point.
> >
> > Microsoft decided to completely redesign the GUI for most of its
> > office products with no option of backward compatibility forcing
> > everyone who knew the old interface (which was basically the same
> > for at least 10 years) to relearn how to use office. For me at work
> > most of my users after having the new office for a few days asked
> > for the old office back since they did not want to spend valuable
> > time relearning office. I certainly would not call that a usability
> > improvement.
>
> Correct.  Someone in the project management office was given their
> head, and what they chose to do with it will (hopefully) turn out to be
> a Career Limiting Move.
>
> I have yet to find anyone who thinks the O2K7 interface is a Pretty
> Neat Idea.
>

Well here's one.  And in fact I think the old interface is a very bad
design.

Addressing what John said, it's ridiculous to say there's no backwards
compatibility.  If users don't like the new interface, use the older
version.  MS has a (freely available) plugin that allows it to read the O2K7
files.  Aside from that, the argument that MS should not have changed the
interface has the big assumption that the interface was good to begin with.
When Word had the functionality of Wordpad, it was fine, but that hasn't
been true for 10 or 15 years.  Just because some user have learned to deal
with some of the complexities of the old interface, does not mean it's
good.  Put a new user in front of the (old) interface and they'll struggle
to be able to use more than a minute fraction of Word's capabilities.

I've used Office 2K7 with the ribbon interface.  (IMHO) MS has clearly put a
lot of thought into useability with this.  It's one of the most
well-designed and intuitive interfaces I've ever used, and I believe a lot
of smart people spent a lot of time on it.  Try playing around with it with
an objective eye, not as a comparison to the previous version of Office.

If anyone is really interested in this OT subject, there's a good
presentation here on how/why MS developed the ribbon:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx

Note: I don't work for MS.  MS does a lot of things I don't like.  I
wouldn't argue that their ultimate end (or any company's) isn't to make
money.  I think if you're a power Office user, you may indeed find it harder
to do things in O2K7.  I won't be surprised if I get flames for this post,
and it was against my better judgement.  I just wanted to say I think the
ribbon is good design.

-Jerry
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