6 ms·

Ronco Spray-On Usability

43 points by amilr 17y ago

raganwald 17y ago
These paragraphs ought to be required reading for anyone calling themselves a programmer: Oh, I see: the problem is that Linux developers are just so fucking smart that they overlook the problems faced by “dumb users” such as dear old A.T. But everything will fall into place with just a little attitude adjustment. Well, allow me to retort. UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between: * software that performs function X; and * software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work. Raymond acknowledges neither. It’s not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no. Conversely, some people who are good UI designers aren’t programmers. But the rock stars are the guys who can do both, and they are few and far between. If there’s a glib, nutshell synopsis for why Linux desktop software tends to suck, it’s this: Raymond and his ilk have no respect for anyone but themselves. They have no respect for the fact that UI design is a special talent. They have no respect for the fact that good UI design requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. And, most importantly, they have no respect at all for real users. The idea that GUI software needs to be designed for “dumb users” — which is Raymond’s own term, and an indication of what he really means when he refers to dear old A.T. — is completely wrong. Great software developers don’t design for morons. They design for smart, perceptive people — people just like themselves. They have profound respect for their users. Show Me the Money This is not a Mac thing. Well, it is, but what I mean is that it’s not just a Mac thing. There are a lot of developers creating good UI’s for Windows, for the web, and for other platforms. And, yes, there are even developers creating great UI’s for software running on Linux. But the undeniable truth is this: successful open source software projects tend to be at the developer-level, not the end-user level. E.g., successful open source projects have programming interfaces, not user interfaces. Apache, Perl, Python, gcc, PHP, the various SQL databases. The list of fantastic open source developer software is long. The list of fantastic open source GUI software is short. This is not a function of chance. The open source revolution has done nothing to change the fact that the best-designed, most-intuitive user interfaces are found in closed-source commercial software. I’m not saying all commercial software is well-designed, nor that all free software is poorly-designed — what I’m saying is that software that does provide a well-designed, intuitive interface tends to be closed and commercial. The bigger the software, the more likely this is to be true. The most obvious explanation is that the open source model does not work well for producing software with good usability. Everything in Raymond’s article hints at this truth. (Not to mention MPT’s aforementioned essay, which addresses this directly.) Good user interfaces result from long, hard work, by talented developers and designers.
swombat 17y ago
Interesting if a bit old (April 2004?) article... One bit I strongly disagree with: It’s not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no. You can learn to write, and you can learn to draw. Plenty of people do. And I'm pretty sure that you can learn to design good UIs too. Sure, having an innate ability for it helps, but it's not a sine-qua-non.
- TJensen 17y ago
  I agree with you. More often, what I've seen is that engineers aren't interested in it. It is tedious in ways that are not interesting, often involving working with non-technical people. Most engineers I've worked with find things like "yes, it really matters that those labels are lined up pixel perfect" to be annoyances at best. We tend to work at a deeper level, thinking behind the screen, so we don't often see the screen.
  - warwick 17y ago
    Unfortunately if you only think of usability as 'the labels are lined up perfectly', you won't create good interfaces.
    - TJensen 17y ago
      I agree. However, if you won't do the easy stuff (which is critical to making a good interface), how likely are you to do the hard stuff (understanding the user to know how they are going to use the software)?
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Most engineers I've worked with find things like "yes, it really matters that those labels are lined up pixel perfect" to be annoyances at best. We tend to work at a deeper level, thinking behind the screen, so we don't often see the screen. This statement suggests to me that you missed the entire point of Gruber's essay. To whit: This idea, that the hard work of development is in building the underlying foundation, and that the easy part is writing a “GUI wrapper”, has been the Linux/Unix way all along... UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. I'm with Gruber. Good UI is not aligning pixels after the fact. Aligning pixels is to usability as formatting source code is to programming. I abhor the idea that programming is a "deeper level" than usability. In fact, it's the other way around: Usability is a deeper level than programming. Let me give you an example. Dave Winer had to edit a lot of hierarchal text in the form of Pascal programs. He then got the idea of editing hierarchal text in the form of outlines, and an entire category of software was born. That category was later subsumed by other programs, to the point where nearly everything we use today has some sort of outline editing capability. UI design was not arguing about which symbols represent collapsed and expanded headlines, or whether the target of dragging an outline should highlight the parent or hilight the space between elements where the dragged outline will go. UI design was thinking up the idea of editing outlines instead of editing characters and words. http://www.outliners.com/ http://www.outliners.com/ p.s. That being said, I agree with you as well. Many so-called UI designers don't get Gruber's point either, and they will natter endlessly about pixels and colours and CSS grids while having nothing but tired cliché opinions about the actual mental model and functionality of software. When a "designer" is really a stylist, it is very tiresome to work with them. Since they have nothing else to contribute, they become infuriating nitpickers over trivia just as you suggest.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
There at least one glaring flaw in his argument. He implies you can't bolt a good UI onto open source software after finishing the core functionality, yet the article revolves around CUPS which Apple themselves took and bolted a good UI onto. Strangely he makes no mention of this fact. Apple also hired the author and now own the copyright to CUPS which is still Free Software (http://www.cups.org/ http://www.cups.org/). It's worth noting for those who weren't early adopters of Mac OS X that printer compatability sucked pretty hard before the adoption of CUPS since Mac OS X was both new and unpopular at the time. Is it technically "usable" if it doesn't work? Apple clearly saw the benefit of jumping on the bandwagon of an open standard, and this let them concentrate on other things like the UI. The same could be said for much of Mac OS X. Both the positive OSS examples he mentions, Firefox and Camino, were likewise primarily GUIs bolted onto the Mozilla core after the fact. Gruber is mostly right about usability being hard and about it being a skill but he generally doesn't get Open Source, nor Free Software, nor Unix even though Apple now dabbles to varying degrees in all these things. And his lack of insight shows. How many hackers would agree that "More often than not, you get what you pay for" holds true for software. But the 20:20 hindsight award goes to the second last paragraph: "It’s easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn, the next major release of Windows. 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?"
- raganwald 17y ago
  I agree that you can find a way to bolt good UI over anything, much as we've done amazing things with the "stateless" web. But there is a large truth underlying his argument, which is that you will have much better results if you design for usability first not last, and also that the amount of work required to make good usability can be an order of magnitude more than the amount of work required to build a raw API. My big takeaway when I first read it was that you can't think that 80% of the job is the implementation and that the UI will be 20% of the work to be done after you hammer out its functionality.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    That the UI is important and hard work a standard opinion for Gruber and Apple fans generally (myself included). This particular article is about how Open Source software cannot achieve this, mostly due to limits placed on it by Gruber's own stereotypes. Why can't it be commercial? Why can't it hire UI guys with training and insight. In fact it does both these things.
DannoHung 17y ago
My take is this: The general culture for Linux is that there are and should be more than one way to do it, versatility is encouraged and that placing significant emphasis on one way over the other is frowned upon. Given that this attitude is pervasive amongst all aspects of Linux, this is like a sausage enthusiast trying to get his neighbor excited about his vacation photos from a kill-floor when the neighbor just wanted to stop over and have a wurst.
just_the_tip 17y ago
In regard to the printer sharing problem, it's pretty much solved today thanks to zeroconf (marketed as Bonjour by Apple). It makes addressing computers and advertising services in the local area network much easier. I wish more developers would take advantage of zeroconf.
compay 17y ago
"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?" If I were reading that at the time the article was written I would probably be nodding my head in agreement. But I think the latest Ubuntu is generally much more usable than Vista. My 70 year old mom is sick to death of Vista, I'm going to be installing Ubuntu for her in a couple weeks, so I guess I'll get the chance to find out if I'm right.
dkarl 17y ago
In what world does the "archetypal nontechnical user" have two computers connected by Ethernet? Ignoring the difference between Ethernet and 802.llb/g/n, this was commonplace even when the article was written. Dad has a printer hooked up to his desktop. Aunt Tillie borrows Mom's laptop to look up a recipe on foodnetwork.com. Voila, two computers connected over a local network, and Aunt Tillie wants to print out her recipe on Dad's printer.
olof 17y ago
If I where the author of this crap I would quietly remove this article. How embarrassing to have written this and not only be wrong in almost every argument he stated as fact but also in all predictions. Apple fan boys are funny.
delano 17y ago
I was disappointed that the only reference to Ronco was the title. Can we make turkey jerky now?

43 points by amilr 17y ago

These paragraphs ought to be required reading for anyone calling themselves a programmer: Oh, I see: the problem is that Linux developers are just so fucking smart that they overlook the problems faced by “dumb users” such as dear old A.T. But everything will fall into place with just a little attitude adjustment. Well, allow me to retort. UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between: * software that performs function X; and * software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work. Raymond acknowledges neither. It’s not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no. Conversely, some people who are good UI designers aren’t programmers. But the rock stars are the guys who can do both, and they are few and far between. If there’s a glib, nutshell synopsis for why Linux desktop software tends to suck, it’s this: Raymond and his ilk have no respect for anyone but themselves. They have no respect for the fact that UI design is a special talent. They have no respect for the fact that good UI design requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. And, most importantly, they have no respect at all for real users. The idea that GUI software needs to be designed for “dumb users” — which is Raymond’s own term, and an indication of what he really means when he refers to dear old A.T. — is completely wrong. Great software developers don’t design for morons. They design for smart, perceptive people — people just like themselves. They have profound respect for their users. Show Me the Money This is not a Mac thing. Well, it is, but what I mean is that it’s not just a Mac thing. There are a lot of developers creating good UI’s for Windows, for the web, and for other platforms. And, yes, there are even developers creating great UI’s for software running on Linux. But the undeniable truth is this: successful open source software projects tend to be at the developer-level, not the end-user level. E.g., successful open source projects have programming interfaces, not user interfaces. Apache, Perl, Python, gcc, PHP, the various SQL databases. The list of fantastic open source developer software is long. The list of fantastic open source GUI software is short. This is not a function of chance. The open source revolution has done nothing to change the fact that the best-designed, most-intuitive user interfaces are found in closed-source commercial software. I’m not saying all commercial software is well-designed, nor that all free software is poorly-designed — what I’m saying is that software that does provide a well-designed, intuitive interface tends to be closed and commercial. The bigger the software, the more likely this is to be true. The most obvious explanation is that the open source model does not work well for producing software with good usability. Everything in Raymond’s article hints at this truth. (Not to mention MPT’s aforementioned essay, which addresses this directly.) Good user interfaces result from long, hard work, by talented developers and designers.

swombat 17y ago

Interesting if a bit old (April 2004?) article... One bit I strongly disagree with: It’s not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no. You can learn to write, and you can learn to draw. Plenty of people do. And I'm pretty sure that you can learn to design good UIs too. Sure, having an innate ability for it helps, but it's not a sine-qua-non.

TJensen 17y ago
I agree with you. More often, what I've seen is that engineers aren't interested in it. It is tedious in ways that are not interesting, often involving working with non-technical people. Most engineers I've worked with find things like "yes, it really matters that those labels are lined up pixel perfect" to be annoyances at best. We tend to work at a deeper level, thinking behind the screen, so we don't often see the screen.
- warwick 17y ago
  Unfortunately if you only think of usability as 'the labels are lined up perfectly', you won't create good interfaces.
  - TJensen 17y ago
    I agree. However, if you won't do the easy stuff (which is critical to making a good interface), how likely are you to do the hard stuff (understanding the user to know how they are going to use the software)?
- raganwald 17y ago
  Most engineers I've worked with find things like "yes, it really matters that those labels are lined up pixel perfect" to be annoyances at best. We tend to work at a deeper level, thinking behind the screen, so we don't often see the screen. This statement suggests to me that you missed the entire point of Gruber's essay. To whit: This idea, that the hard work of development is in building the underlying foundation, and that the easy part is writing a “GUI wrapper”, has been the Linux/Unix way all along... UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. I'm with Gruber. Good UI is not aligning pixels after the fact. Aligning pixels is to usability as formatting source code is to programming. I abhor the idea that programming is a "deeper level" than usability. In fact, it's the other way around: Usability is a deeper level than programming. Let me give you an example. Dave Winer had to edit a lot of hierarchal text in the form of Pascal programs. He then got the idea of editing hierarchal text in the form of outlines, and an entire category of software was born. That category was later subsumed by other programs, to the point where nearly everything we use today has some sort of outline editing capability. UI design was not arguing about which symbols represent collapsed and expanded headlines, or whether the target of dragging an outline should highlight the parent or hilight the space between elements where the dragged outline will go. UI design was thinking up the idea of editing outlines instead of editing characters and words. http://www.outliners.com/ http://www.outliners.com/ p.s. That being said, I agree with you as well. Many so-called UI designers don't get Gruber's point either, and they will natter endlessly about pixels and colours and CSS grids while having nothing but tired cliché opinions about the actual mental model and functionality of software. When a "designer" is really a stylist, it is very tiresome to work with them. Since they have nothing else to contribute, they become infuriating nitpickers over trivia just as you suggest.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

There at least one glaring flaw in his argument. He implies you can't bolt a good UI onto open source software after finishing the core functionality, yet the article revolves around CUPS which Apple themselves took and bolted a good UI onto. Strangely he makes no mention of this fact. Apple also hired the author and now own the copyright to CUPS which is still Free Software (http://www.cups.org/ http://www.cups.org/). It's worth noting for those who weren't early adopters of Mac OS X that printer compatability sucked pretty hard before the adoption of CUPS since Mac OS X was both new and unpopular at the time. Is it technically "usable" if it doesn't work? Apple clearly saw the benefit of jumping on the bandwagon of an open standard, and this let them concentrate on other things like the UI. The same could be said for much of Mac OS X. Both the positive OSS examples he mentions, Firefox and Camino, were likewise primarily GUIs bolted onto the Mozilla core after the fact. Gruber is mostly right about usability being hard and about it being a skill but he generally doesn't get Open Source, nor Free Software, nor Unix even though Apple now dabbles to varying degrees in all these things. And his lack of insight shows. How many hackers would agree that "More often than not, you get what you pay for" holds true for software. But the 20:20 hindsight award goes to the second last paragraph: "It’s easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn, the next major release of Windows. 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?"

raganwald 17y ago
I agree that you can find a way to bolt good UI over anything, much as we've done amazing things with the "stateless" web. But there is a large truth underlying his argument, which is that you will have much better results if you design for usability first not last, and also that the amount of work required to make good usability can be an order of magnitude more than the amount of work required to build a raw API. My big takeaway when I first read it was that you can't think that 80% of the job is the implementation and that the UI will be 20% of the work to be done after you hammer out its functionality.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  That the UI is important and hard work a standard opinion for Gruber and Apple fans generally (myself included). This particular article is about how Open Source software cannot achieve this, mostly due to limits placed on it by Gruber's own stereotypes. Why can't it be commercial? Why can't it hire UI guys with training and insight. In fact it does both these things.

DannoHung 17y ago

My take is this: The general culture for Linux is that there are and should be more than one way to do it, versatility is encouraged and that placing significant emphasis on one way over the other is frowned upon. Given that this attitude is pervasive amongst all aspects of Linux, this is like a sausage enthusiast trying to get his neighbor excited about his vacation photos from a kill-floor when the neighbor just wanted to stop over and have a wurst.

just_the_tip 17y ago

In regard to the printer sharing problem, it's pretty much solved today thanks to zeroconf (marketed as Bonjour by Apple). It makes addressing computers and advertising services in the local area network much easier. I wish more developers would take advantage of zeroconf.

compay 17y ago

"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?" If I were reading that at the time the article was written I would probably be nodding my head in agreement. But I think the latest Ubuntu is generally much more usable than Vista. My 70 year old mom is sick to death of Vista, I'm going to be installing Ubuntu for her in a couple weeks, so I guess I'll get the chance to find out if I'm right.

dkarl 17y ago

In what world does the "archetypal nontechnical user" have two computers connected by Ethernet? Ignoring the difference between Ethernet and 802.llb/g/n, this was commonplace even when the article was written. Dad has a printer hooked up to his desktop. Aunt Tillie borrows Mom's laptop to look up a recipe on foodnetwork.com. Voila, two computers connected over a local network, and Aunt Tillie wants to print out her recipe on Dad's printer.

olof 17y ago

If I where the author of this crap I would quietly remove this article. How embarrassing to have written this and not only be wrong in almost every argument he stated as fact but also in all predictions. Apple fan boys are funny.

delano 17y ago

I was disappointed that the only reference to Ronco was the title. Can we make turkey jerky now?