From: Till Kamppeter < till kamppeter gmx net>
To: usability gnome org
Cc: Owen Taylor < otaylor redhat com>, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com,
desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 02:33:22 +0100
Oi,
I am Till Kamppeter, project leader and maintainer of linuxprinting.org
and Foomatic. I am also developer for Printing and Digital Imaging at
Mandriva in Paris. But I do not only work on the site and on Mandriva
Linux, I am in general trying to make printing with free software better.
I am joining the GNOME usability list to discuss the printing dialog of
GNOME.
10 days ago I have been on the OSDL Desktop Architects Meeting in
Portland
(http://groups.osdl.org/apps/group_public/download.php/1522/osdl_invite_L2_P7.pdf,
http://kegel.com/osdl/da05.html,
http://www.linuxprinting.org/till/dam2005/photos/) and there I have also
talked about the printing problems. And we all were of the opinion that
the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox and
Thunderbird) needs improvement.
We considered especially as the problems of GNOME's printing dialog that
there is no access to the full feature set of the printer according to
the PPD file used for the CUPS queue. Also pre-processing (N-Up, ...)
and scheduling options (hold until 6pm, ...) of CUPS are not available
in the GNOME dialog but they are available in the KDE dialog.
Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for
engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
Firefox, and Thunderbird.
Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
than useful to the user.
But on the other side the user wants to make use of the full
functionality of his printer. He has payed for it.
So I discussed with Frederic about possible solutions, especially about
how to present the options in a better way. Suggestions are
- Devide up the options in well-chosen groups
- Make sure option names are always the same for options which do the
same on printers from different manufacturers
- Let option names and their I18N not come from the manufacturers but
from a neutral usability team, so that they are optimized for
usability and not for marketing
- Assign images to these common option names (and also the appropriate
choices) to make clear what the options mean, a picture tells more
than a thousand words.
- Set up a translation database which translates the manufacturer's
option names to the common option names
- Set up a database of usability ratings of options. Which ones are the
most useful? Which ones cannot be left out because otherwise the
printer is rendered unusable (or cannot be used for the task for which
it is made for)? Which ones do rather confuse than help the user?
Which ones are completely irrelevant in a Linux/Unix printing
environment? These ratings will help to place the options in the
dialog: Essential, important options should be directly visible, less
important perhaps only in a sub dialog, which is opened by clicking an
"Advanced Settings" button, or by switching the dialog into an "Expert
Mode".
So what do you think?
I will also organize a Printing Summit in 2006 (most probably March,
April or so) where desktop and usability will be one of the main
subjects. There everyone who works on the developemnt of printing should
meet. Not only driver and spooler developers should come, but also
people working on printing integration in desktop environments (KDE,
GNOME, ...) and document-producing applications (OOo, Scribus, KOffice,
Firefox, ...) should participate. So I want to invite also people from
the GNOME usability team and from GNOME printing to discuss the best way
with other printing people. Probably this will help us to get onto the
right way for an easy-to-use printing dialog also for feature-rich printers.
Till
From: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
To: Till Kamppeter < till kamppeter gmx net>
Cc: usability gnome org, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 17:46:21 -0800 (PST)
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Till Kamppeter wrote:
>
> Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
> listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
> listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
> than useful to the user.
I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Please, just tell people to use KDE.
Linus
From: Jeff Waugh < jdub perkypants org>
To: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
Cc: usability gnome org, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:56:24 +1100
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> >
> > Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
> > listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
> > listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
> > than useful to the user.
>
> I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
>
> This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
> Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
> use it.
Hi Linus,
That's definitely not a point of view of the GNOME Project - we're focused
on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don't talk
about 'dumb users'), but just don't care about computing technology. We're
just like every other Free Software project - fixing stuff requires the work
and attention of people who care about the problem at hand. If you want to
chat about what's missing in GNOME sometime, I'm always available and keen
to hear feedback, but I can understand if it's not of interest to you.
Hope to see you again at linux.conf.au. :-)
Thanks,
- Jeff
--
linux.conf.au 2006: Dunedin, New Zealand http://linux.conf.au/
"I came for the quality, but I stayed for the freedom." - Sean Neakums
From: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
To: Jeff Waugh < jdub perkypants org>
Cc: usability gnome org, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:35:58 -0800 (PST)
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Jeff Waugh wrote:
>
> That's definitely not a point of view of the GNOME Project - we're focused
> on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don't talk
> about 'dumb users'), but just don't care about computing technology. We're
> just like every other Free Software project - fixing stuff requires the work
> and attention of people who care about the problem at hand.
No. I've talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing
capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the user".
That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems
to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not
doign something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse
users".
The current example of "intentionally not listed in the printing dialog,
the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options." is clearly
not the exception, but the rule.
Jeff, if the explanation had been "exposing PPD features is too hard, we
need developer manpower", I'd have understood. THAT is what open source
projects tend to say. Not "powerful interfaces might confuse users and not
look nice".
If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times.
And only ever from Gnome.
The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of
is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different
mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor
users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one.
And when I tell people that, they tend to nod, and have some story of
their own why they had a feature they used to use, but it was removed
because it might have been confusing.
Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users
just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection
thing, never mind that it's a million times slower.
Linus
From: Havoc Pennington < hp pobox com>
To: Till Kamppeter < till kamppeter gmx net>
Cc: usability gnome org, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 23:37:11 -0500
Hi,
No clue what the history of PPD stuff in GNOME in particular is, but
if I can go on a little tangent about the best approach to sorting it
out with the usability people (or rather, software designers).
The "XYZ is too confusing for idiots" line is kind of a caricature
strawman of a position, stated only so it can be shot down. No good
software designer is thinking about their work in the way that
engineers and sysadmins seem to think when they say the "confusing to
idiots" line.
- "avoid being confusing" isn't the goal; the goal is to provide
specific functionality/experience
to some specific (hopefully well-understood, maybe narrow, maybe
broad) set of people.
- "idiots" hopefully isn't how one thinks of this set of people, the
closest accurate
words might be "busy" and "not interested in our software for its own sake"
- "universal design" that's good for as many people as possible is
one ideal, though
not always possible
When designers try to avoid clutter I think they'd consider it more
"distracting" or "not the most important use of limited engineering
time and resources" or "evidence of a root problem with the design" or
"lack of focus" rather than "confusing" (in my experience).
Think about car design; what's clutter on an SUV is not the same as
what's clutter on a Ferrari. Cars are not designed in order to "avoid
being confusing to idiots," but neither is every car a combination
pickup/station-wagon/SUV/sportscar that's all things to all people.
There are cars that I love and that I hate, but (almost) every car has
someone that loves it.
Of the cars that I hate, I'm not really "confused" by them, but I do
find that they don't appeal to my lifestyle or tastes.
If you approach an interaction designer or usability team with an
argument like "there should be no tradeoffs, just dump it all in!
nope, no clue what the use-case or root problem is! yee-haw!" they'll
respond about the same way most software maintainers would if you
submitted a patch with that rationale, or about how a car designer
would if you proposed the universal car for every situation and
person.
I'm just suggesting that if you wanted to talk to people about this
it'd be good to cook up some details. What kinds of things can
printers do? What kinds of users use those things or buy those
printers? How do those things fit in to the person's work or fun?
Designers aren't going to want to talk about the idea of "stuff in the
PPD file," they're going to want to talk about "stuff people want to
do."
I think most designers would be primarily worried that something
important in the PPD stuff is only exposed as autogenerated cruft UI
on the advanced tab. i.e. they'd want to be sure anything important
had a good, visible UI somewhere (in the dialog or somewhere better).
Once a designer understood the set of important things, I bet they'd
be fairly indifferent about dumping all the rest that a couple people
somewhere possibly care about on an Advanced tab.
BTW people who are supporters of design decisions often _also_
misunderstand the point as "not being confusing to dumb users" and
advocate the changes under that formulation. Which is kind of
counterproductive and fails to emphasize what's genuinely worth
talking about. I'm sure you can dig up some quotes from me in the past
where I didn't get this either.
Off topic even further into personal editorial, I don't really agree
with Jeff's view that everyone can be happy. I have the view that you
can't optimize for everyone and that there are two kinds of products:
a) the kind that lots of people love and lots of people hate
b) the kind that everyone can live with
My personality leans a bit toward a) and I can even get a perverse
kick out of making the right kind of people hate something ;-) but b)
is probably more right for a "commoditization" product strategy and
the adults in the room.
Cute blog post on this, with pictures:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/01/be_brave.html
The reaction Linus has probably comes in part from when I was having a
good time actively antagonizing people like Linus rather than just
quietly focusing on different audiences. His followup mail mentioning
the window manager seems to support my guess that it's my fault ;-)
Given finite resources, I think it was more often than not correct to
make the decisions that Linus and friends complain about, and
(personally) I think it makes GNOME a better desktop that we did make
them. I'll skip the reasons why here, they are mostly historical
accident anyway.
At the same time, it wasn't really necessary for me (or whoever else,
don't want to be egotistical here) to troll while doing it. I'm glad
people like Jeff don't have my little quirks ;-)
and he's much more representative of today's GNOME (which I have no
influence over to speak of).
I'm typing this in a gmail text box that is maybe 15 lines high,
clearly optimized for people who send reasonable-length email instead
of Havoc-length email. I'm sure reporting this to the gmail people
would result in them thinking "we aren't going to optimize our stuff
for this crazy nutjob" but they'd probably be clever enough not to
explain it that way which is where they're one-up on my window manager
maintenance techniques.
I do worry that while in the past both GNOME and KDE were firmly in
camp a) - with different audiences and thus lovers/haters, making the
"two desktop" thing halfway useful even - more recently they are both
moving toward b). But I trust the current leadership of those projects
to figure out the right path and walk this fine line nicely.
Havoc
From: Havoc Pennington < hp pobox com>
To: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
Cc: usability gnome org, Jeff Waugh < jdub perkypants org>, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:19:36 -0500
Hi,
Tangent fest ;-)
On 12/12/05, Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org> wrote:
> The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of
> is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different
> mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor
> users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one.
Just for the record, since I made this decision I can tell you that
"might confuse people" was not the reason. More evidence for my point
that "might confuse people" is the reason made up by others, not the
reason given by the decision makers.
First some context. The overall metacity plan was to first get all the
defaults right as priority one, and then add more configurability and
options consistent with keeping the defaults right. This was the
driving "principle" if there was a principle at all. (The weekend I
started on metacity the motivation was more "my # %$ WM doesn't work,
I'm just going to write one that works how I like")
On the specific feature of arbitrary button bindings, the full
discussion is archived in bugzilla. But my memory of this feature is:
- I put in a lot of special cases to get the default behavior exactly right;
the event handlers for mouse buttons do not look like "run the
action associated with
this button," they are more complicated
- I spent a few days trying to code a patch that made button actions
configurable
while preserving all the detailed behaviors I had coded, and I just
kind of gave
up because the patch was too hard/complicated/big and I wasn't willing to
break the default behavior in order to simplify the code.
- I did put in configuration of the most common stuff people wanted to change,
like double click action and alt+click modifier key, and this made
most people
happy (based on reduction in bugzilla/email traffic)
My patch is still in bugzilla, if anyone wants to start from it and
find the simple and elegant way to code it. The patch as I left it is
buggy though and had a couple "hard to fix" problems. Plus it's
against a pretty old version of metacity I guess.
BTW, though I confess that I like to reject window manager patches, I
also spent a ton of time getting EWMH usable and supporting it in
GNOME. The only purpose of EWMH is to make the window manager
replaceable.
You may be noticing that I like the idea of "choice of two
well-focused designs" better than "single choice of one
nobody-hates-it design."
Anyway. The primary issue with preferences in metacity was never
confusing users - that would only be an issue with displaying prefs in
the dialog, i.e. unlimited prefs would be OK, as long as they were
hidden. The more important issue I always had in my mind was the
quality of the defaults, and ability to spend time polishing the
defaults. The tradeoff came from amount of personal time I had, code
complexity, and interdependencies among prefs.
But, I pretty often flamed people complaining about lack of prefs in
bugzilla, so I can't really whine about being misunderstood :-P
> Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users
> just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection
> thing, never mind that it's a million times slower.
I don't think "too confusing" was the reason here either, though I
can't speak authoritatively since I didn't design this.
There was also a bad rap here since in the original design spec (and
current file selector) you can in fact just type the filename. The
text entry box appears as soon as you press a key. You can also press
Ctrl+L to get a text box with autocomplete. But version 1.0 didn't
have this since the coders ran out of time.
I'd also point out that OS X makes the same basic decision as GNOME to
avoid the "foo/bar" path notation in the default UI, so while it
(agreed) is not ideal for users who are primarily shell users, I don't
think it's a particularly radical or unprecedented choice in the big
picture.
Havoc
From: Nat Friedman < nat novell com>
To: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
Cc: jody gnome org, desktop_architects lists osdl org, mclasen redhat com, usability gnome org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:47:08 -0500
On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 17:46 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
Everyone on this list knows the Linux desktop is in a "pick your poison"
state right now.
Anyone who's used Linux for a year has experienced this, whatever
choices they've made of desktop environment, settings, etc.
We can snipe at each other all day long. (Linus, every time I copy
large files between devices on my Linux system my mouse pointer skips.
It works fine on my Mac). That's not productive.
Usability is important. Usability encompasses multiple things:
functionality, robustness, performance, sensible user interface design.
We all need to do a better job of this (insert usability
testing/betterdesktop.org plug here).
Yes, some GNOME developers are self-appointed control freak antifeature
nazis who've stripped functionality in pursuit of some theoretical "non
geek" user who does not exist, thereby crippling their software.
And probably some KDE developers are feature sluts who never saw a
checkbox they didn't love, exposing users to all kinds of broken
features.
Follow either of these ideas to their logical extremes and we won't have
a useful desktop for a large user base.
We need Linux to grow up if we're going to make Linux on the desktop a
success. Let's have a grown-up discussion. If I worked for Microsoft
I'd be very happy to see you throwing pejoratives around like that on
this list.
So, yes, usability is important and Linus being able to bind his mouse
buttons to whatever he wants is important, I guess. But it's probably
not what's stopping Linux from dominating the desktop market. What's
holding Linux back on the desktop? Applications, device support. Time,
also. The printing dialog? I don't know.
(By the way, on my GNOME machine at home, there is code running that
parses the options from the PPD file and makes a GUI out of them. Maybe
this ships in SUSE but not in whatever distro Till is using?)
Nat
From: Christopher Blizzard < blizzard redhat com>
To: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
Cc: usability gnome org, Jeff Waugh < jdub perkypants org>, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 01:45:12 -0500
I'll jump in here, too, because I've done a lot of thinking about this
lately, trying to make it possible to explain to people where projects
like GNOME and the Firefox project have gone. I suspect that in your
mind that they have just "gone crazy" but I promise there is a method to
the madness that you see.
First, I want to throw out the word "Usability." I hate it. Hate hate
hate. Because it describes something that doesn't exist in the real
world. Why? Because as you have discovered it's entirely subjective.
That is, it means different things to different people. For me it means
something that doesn't get in my way, is visually elegant and easy to
teach others to use. For you it means something that you can configure
to your specific needs, probably based on how you've done things in the
past and makes you the most productive. Two different people, two
different targets and for one it's "usable" and for the other one it's a
shitpile. That's why I think that we need to chuck that word right out
the window.
Instead, let's use the word "design" because it describes not the end
result - what you and I feel about the experience - but instead it
describes the process that we use to make decisions. During that
process a lot of things happen. These include choosing which users we
want to target, how an interface should be presented to a user based on
who they are, what their experience should be, what a system is capable
of doing and other things. Each of that adds up to software that's a
reflection of a target audience. But you don't actually give a shit
about this, because you're focused on one particular fact: people
removed crap that was core to the way that you got work done.
And this brings us to one of the fundamental tenants of design: that you
have to make tradeoffs based on the users who you are targeting. Havoc
eluded in other email to this, but largely in the context of a strategy
for the desktop. For people like you this means that sometimes stuff
gets removed that you care about. But for someone like me, who cares
about getting the default experience right for a large base of users,
this is a tradeoff that I'm willing to make because it increases the
pool of available users. Even if it means that someone like yourself
can't stand to use it without making changes to the way you work.
Which is the lead up to the next statement logical question: if not you,
then who are we targeting? I think the answer there is reasonably well
understood in the GNOME design communities but misunderstood outside of
that core group. At this point we're interested in corporate users
(office, productivity, mobile users), fixed function users (people who
do only one or two things) and some subset of hackers. But I guess not
hackers who want to configure everything themselves. This leads up to a
few design rules that I see at work in GNOME and Firefox:
1. Shit should just work.
One of the best demos I've seen so far was when we managed to get to the
point where if you had a desktop application up and running with the
print dialog _already open_ and you plugged a printer into the back of
the computer, it just appeared in the dialog. No confusing
configuration dialogs, no searching the interface for the right model
type, it just freaking showed up. That took an incredible amount of
work to get right and we could have left 70% of it up to the user to
figure out, but we wanted to do better than that. I've got better
things to do with my time (like replying to angry email from kernel
hackers, hi!) than to mess with printer settings.
The vision of this kind of experience is what drives NetworkManager as
well, but we're not quite there yet.
2. Shit should be easy to figure the fuck out.
This is the hardest one to solve because "easy to figure out" means
different things to different people. Hence, death to usability, hello
design! This means finding that delicate balance between how people
expect things to work (why doesn't middle click maximize my window?) and
how they might learn something new (hence the "Computer" icon on my
desktop that lets me find the local network and filesystem.) This is
the hardest part of design, really, requiring some kind of balancing act
between good guesses, solid research and an eye to history.
3. This club is not all-inclusive.
Yep, someone is going to get pissed off if you design something and make
a decision about how something is going to work. This isn't easy and is
the cause for email like this, but if we're not pissing someone off
we're not making someone else happy.
So let's bring this back to your original assertion about GNOME and KDE
and probably the point of this email: we don't think that people are
idiots, we just think that in 90% of the cases people have better things
to do than learn the low level details of the desktop and how to
configure confusing key combinations. Software should "just work" for
our users, express clearly what's going on on the system, and it should
be accessible to a wide audience. This doesn't mean that GNOME sucks
and KDE rules - it just means that it's not right for _you_. And for
the record I feel the same way about KDE. I think that it's fine, but
just not for me. And lucky for you, there are still a lot of desktop
options out there that fit your bill.
So I hope that this email gives you a little better perspective on where
we're coming from. We're not treating people like idiots, we're just
trying to make an operating system that tries to make computers not get
in the way but instead enable a large number of people to get useful
work done.
--Chris
On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 19:35 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> >
> > That's definitely not a point of view of the GNOME Project - we're focused
> > on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don't talk
> > about 'dumb users'), but just don't care about computing technology. We're
> > just like every other Free Software project - fixing stuff requires the work
> > and attention of people who care about the problem at hand.
>
> No. I've talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing
> capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the user".
>
> That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems
> to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not
> doign something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse
> users".
>
> The current example of "intentionally not listed in the printing dialog,
> the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options." is clearly
> not the exception, but the rule.
>
> Jeff, if the explanation had been "exposing PPD features is too hard, we
> need developer manpower", I'd have understood. THAT is what open source
> projects tend to say. Not "powerful interfaces might confuse users and not
> look nice".
>
> If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times.
> And only ever from Gnome.
>
> The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of
> is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different
> mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor
> users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one.
>
> And when I tell people that, they tend to nod, and have some story of
> their own why they had a feature they used to use, but it was removed
> because it might have been confusing.
>
> Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users
> just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection
> thing, never mind that it's a million times slower.
>
> Linus
> _______________________________________________
> Desktop_architects mailing list
> Desktop_architects lists osdl org
> https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
From: Mike Shaver < shaver mozilla org>
To: Christopher Blizzard < blizzard redhat com>
Cc: usability gnome org, Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>, Jeff Waugh
< jdub perkypants org>, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:04:29 -0500
On 13-Dec-05, at 1:45 AM, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> First, I want to throw out the word "Usability." I hate it. Hate hate
> hate. Because it describes something that doesn't exist in the real
> world. Why? Because as you have discovered it's entirely subjective.
Subjective personal response to things _does_ exist in the real world, and
is the basis for such promising new developments as "love", "democracy", and
"advertising". That you can't quantify how much a user enjoys using your
software doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about it, or try to improve it
in the aggregate or even for a specific high-value user. Optometrists don't
measure how much better A looks than B, but that I can tell them which I prefer
lets them hone in pretty well on which lenses I should be wearing.
> We're not treating people like idiots, we're just
> trying to make an operating system that tries to make computers not get
> in the way but instead enable a large number of people to get useful
> work done.
You're trying to make a _free_ operating system that gets out of the way.
Sometimes it's likely that you'll have to compromise on some element of Just
Works to preserve that. Firefox could make a number of sites Just Work by
pulling up Trident or running ActiveX (via Wine, even!), but we don't because
"Just Work" is not our only goal. Managing expectations in users is an
important part of helping their experience along, IMO.
Mike
From: Mike Shaver <shaver mozilla org>
To: Till Kamppeter <till kamppeter gmx net>
Cc: usability gnome org, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 09:37:29 -0500
On 12-Dec-05, at 8:33 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> And we all were of the opinion that
> the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox and
> Thunderbird) needs improvement.
Before Firefox 1.0, there was much kerfuffle over this, and out of that came
a pledge from someone in the GNOME camp to separate the gnome-print dialog
system from the gnome-print "you must render through this" system, such that
the dialog could be used on GNOME desktops. I don't think it ever materialized,
though I can't be bothered to look for the bug now. After the amount of crap
I took for pushing to get the GNOME file dialog in -- and I mean that it was
the single biggest usability complaint from our Linux user community by
several orders of magnitude -- I was in no real rush to go that route again.
I remain unrushed, but if people want to do the work (including the
user-testing work, keeping in mind that we actually care about GNOME
installations that are more than a year old, etc.) then there's probably time
to get it changed in Firefox 2 if the patch is good enough.
(The KDE people are much less vitriolic about how Firefox is wearing white after
Labour Day on their desktop, for whatever reason, and nobody has bothered to even
wire up the file dialog, except for one frustrated hacker who used GNOME.)
Of course, we support more than just Linux in the Unix-printing world, but if the
time has come for an XP_LINUX that differs from XP_UNIX, or even XP_LINUX_GNOME,
then I'd be willing to hear a pitch for it.
> Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
> desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for
> engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
> Firefox, and Thunderbird.
I *humbly* submit that that group is not the right set of people to be discussing
the future of the printing model in Firefox and Thunderbird. By all means put
together a proposal for improving how we print on Linux, but please don't think
that it will be accepted simply by fiat (even my mighty fiat, ahem!). I also
caution against what we've seen as a pattern so far, which is "well, then we'll
just patch our build", for various reasons that aren't really appropriate for
this list.
Mike
From: Jeff Waugh < jdub perkypants org>
To: Linus Torvalds < torvalds osdl org>
Cc: usability gnome org, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:26:46 +1100
> No. I've talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing
> capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the user".
>
> That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems
> to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not
> doign something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse
> users".
So there are a couple of important points here:
1) We absolutely have a responsibility to design software that doesn't
confuse users. The reality is that most software developers can't even
get this right! So if we've rejected ideas, features or designs based
on their inscrutability, I don't think I need to defend that. But it's
a very rare brand of silliness that is rejected for this reason alone!
2) Sometimes this phrase is used as shorthand, or regurgitated by someone
who was not directly involved in a particular design discussion. It's
an easy fallback position, but doesn't usefully represent the approach
we take to design (note: design, not usability). We use personas, use
cases and testing to determine if we're getting things right. It's the
kind of thing that permeates our culture, but has not been expressed
well outside it.
3) Should we care more about "features" or "benefits"? :-)
Let's get practical for a minute. Here's a bunch of screenshots of the GNOME
1.4 global panel preferences dialogue... It's a rat's nest of 'unbreak-me'
options, combinatorial obfuscation, feature accretion and laziness. How much
of this waived developer responsibility helps our users?
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2003/sequelsyndrome/mgp00015.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2003/sequelsyndrome/mgp00016.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2003/sequelsyndrome/mgp00017.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2003/sequelsyndrome/mgp00018.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2003/sequelsyndrome/mgp00019.jpg
> The current example of "intentionally not listed in the printing dialog,
> the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options." is clearly
> not the exception, but the rule.
>
> Jeff, if the explanation had been "exposing PPD features is too hard, we
> need developer manpower", I'd have understood. THAT is what open source
> projects tend to say. Not "powerful interfaces might confuse users and not
> look nice".
Sounds like a third-source answer to me. I've just spoken to a few of the
hackers who worked on the current dialogue - a far more reliable source of
information: The PPD user interface is not exposed due to a combination of
lack of time, a desire to ship what we had, and the challenge to expose PPD
features in a usable and reliable manner (a problem Till understands very
well). Pulling together software built by different projects with different
needs and design briefs, and putting a coherent, *usable* interface on it is
*very* hard work. But it's an incredibly satisfying battle.
> If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times.
> And only ever from Gnome.
>
> The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of
> is very powerfully extensible
Sorry to snip mid-sentence, but this is an important point: We're not aiming
for "powerfully extensible". We're aiming for "Just Works". Some people will
hate that. Some will love it. Personally, I'd rather have passionate users,
lovers and haters, than be than average and ignored, and I think you'll find
most GNOME developers feel the same way.
> Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users
> just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection
> thing, never mind that it's a million times slower.
Jump into a GNOME file dialogue some time and just type a filename. :-) We
didn't get this 100% right when it first shipped, which was disappointing,
but it's top stuff now. Note the similarity in approach to the OS X 'open'
dialogue. We're not alone here, and this is nothing new.
I totally understand where you're coming from. In fact, I spoke about this
at length during my keynote at GUADEC earlier this year. Putting GNOME on a
long-term mission towards the 99.9% of users who don't care about computers
involved a massive cultural shift. On one hand, we've achieved great things
for the Free Software desktop in pursuing this mission. On the other hand,
it has been a pretty singular focus, so in some ways we've gone too far, not
concentrating on scaling up to the needs of our hardcore users. We can fix
that from where we are. It's much harder to go the other way. We've already
felt that pain in the leap from GNOME 1.4 to 2.0. Never again.
Thanks,
- Jeff (ah, good sigmonster)
--
linux.conf.au 2006: Dunedin, New Zealand http://linux.conf.au/
"Well, you know us usability folks... We like to believe that the two
aren't mutually exclusive." - Calum Benson on power and cleanliness
From: Till Kamppeter < till kamppeter gmx net>
To: Mike Shaver < shaver mozilla org>
Cc: usability gnome org, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:39:50 +0100
Mike Shaver wrote:
> On 12-Dec-05, at 8:33 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
>
>> And we all were of the opinion that
>> the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox and
>> Thunderbird) needs improvement.
>
>
> Before Firefox 1.0, there was much kerfuffle over this, and out of that
> came a pledge from someone in the GNOME camp to separate the
> gnome-print dialog system from the gnome-print "you must render through
> this" system, such that the dialog could be used on GNOME desktops. I
> don't think it ever materialized, though I can't be bothered to look
> for the bug now. After the amount of crap I took for pushing to get
> the GNOME file dialog in -- and I mean that it was the single biggest
> usability complaint from our Linux user community by several orders of
> magnitude -- I was in no real rush to go that route again. I remain
> unrushed, but if people want to do the work (including the user-testing
> work, keeping in mind that we actually care about GNOME installations
> that are more than a year old, etc.) then there's probably time to get
> it changed in Firefox 2 if the patch is good enough.
>
> (The KDE people are much less vitriolic about how Firefox is wearing
> white after Labour Day on their desktop, for whatever reason, and
> nobody has bothered to even wire up the file dialog, except for one
> frustrated hacker who used GNOME.)
>
> Of course, we support more than just Linux in the Unix-printing world,
> but if the time has come for an XP_LINUX that differs from XP_UNIX, or
> even XP_LINUX_GNOME, then I'd be willing to hear a pitch for it.
>
>> Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
>> desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for
>> engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
>> Firefox, and Thunderbird.
>
>
> I *humbly* submit that that group is not the right set of people to be
> discussing the future of the printing model in Firefox and
> Thunderbird. By all means put together a proposal for improving how we
> print on Linux, but please don't think that it will be accepted simply
> by fiat (even my mighty fiat, ahem!). I also caution against what
> we've seen as a pattern so far, which is "well, then we'll just patch
> our build", for various reasons that aren't really appropriate for this
> list.
>
> Mike
>
>
I think, the Firefox/Thunderbird dialog has to be replaced urgently, I
do not know how the original one looks like (I am on Mandriva 2006), but
when one clicks on "Properties" and gets a cryptic printing command line
to edit, I think this is far from user-friendly. Then a long list of PPD
options is already MUCH better.
What are the exact rquirements for a Firefox/Thunderbird printing
dialog? Who in the Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird team is responsible for
the dialog? So that one can talk with him.
Till
From: Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
To: usability gnome org
Cc: desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: Re: [Usability] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:07:44 +0100
Le mardi 13 décembre 2005 à 02:33 +0100, Till Kamppeter a écrit :
> Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
> listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
> listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
> than useful to the user.
I'm just going to correct some things Till wrote that I would have said.
It seems either I didn't explained correctly, or Till misunderstood my
explanations (or probably a little of both) on what was the current
state of printing on GNOME and why full PPD options were not in GNOME
yet and why they probably would not go in it by just a snap of a finger
but only after careful interface reviewing. Thus the original message
was sent by Till on GNOME usability mailing list, to try to discuss how
to improve GNOME printing UI.
Thanks to Jeff, Alex and others, the real reasons on why GNOME printing
UI is currently lacking full PPD support have been exposed.
I'm still a little sad to see that a attempt to try to improve printing
support in GNOME and in Firefox/Thunderbird (so, for Desktop on Linux in
general) has been transformed into a gigantic flamewar for absolutely no
good reason, except exhausting electrons for carrying those emails ;)
Hopefully, things will be rolling in the good direction in the future,
with the Printing summit and each project initiatives.
--
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva
From: "Mike Shaver" < shaver mozilla org>
To: "Till Kamppeter" < till kamppeter gmx net>
To: "Mike Shaver" < shaver mozilla org>
Cc: usability gnome org, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com, desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: [Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:00:53 +0000 GMT
The requirements are probably something like "work everywhere that Firefox
works, and don't suck".
We have a user-experience lead whom I love too much to copy on this thread,
but his time is currently best spent on things other than designing our
Unix printing dialog.
Consider this an open invitation for someone to come forward with a proposal,
plan, and patch for the Unix printing experience on Firefox. It's been an
under-owned area, though I think at various times Marco Pesetti, Chrises
Lahey Blizzard and Aillon, and even Jody (hi!) have poked their heads in.
The Sun guys use Xprint or something with their suite builds, but I don't
think supporting Xprint well is a must-have.
I'm glad to hear that you think it's a top priority, because it will probably
take quite a bit of work to get "right", given the breadth of printing and
desktop configurations that we support today.
(Please don't think that you can add a dep on libgnomeui, or even an
especially-recent GTK, though, without a lot of justification and pref control.
We still have users on RH8 and 9 today, to say nothing of older Solaris setups,
and for Firefox 2 at least we're not looking to break them. Of course, a
compelling case that 1997-vintage print dialogs are hurting adoption of Firefox
would be, well, compelling.)
Mike
(Apologies for the wrapping, but nobody has ported Evo to the blackberry yet!)
-----Original Message-----
From: Till Kamppeter < till kamppeter gmx net>
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:39:50
To:Mike Shaver < shaver mozilla org>
Cc:usability gnome org, jody gnome org, mclasen redhat com,
desktop_architects lists osdl org
Subject: Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Mike Shaver wrote:
> On 12-Dec-05, at 8:33 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
>
>> And we all were of the opinion that
>> the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox and
>> Thunderbird) needs improvement.
>
>
> Before Firefox 1.0, there was much kerfuffle over this, and out of that
> came a pledge from someone in the GNOME camp to separate the
> gnome-print dialog system from the gnome-print "you must render through
> this" system, such that the dialog could be used on GNOME desktops. I
> don't think it ever materialized, though I can't be bothered to look
> for the bug now. After the amount of crap I took for pushing to get
> the GNOME file dialog in -- and I mean that it was the single biggest
> usability complaint from our Linux user community by several orders of
> magnitude -- I was in no real rush to go that route again. I remain
> unrushed, but if people want to do the work (including the user-testing
> work, keeping in mind that we actually care about GNOME installations
> that are more than a year old, etc.) then there's probably time to get
> it changed in Firefox 2 if the patch is good enough.
>
> (The KDE people are much less vitriolic about how Firefox is wearing
> white after Labour Day on their desktop, for whatever reason, and
> nobody has bothered to even wire up the file dialog, except for one
> frustrated hacker who used GNOME.)
>
> Of course, we support more than just Linux in the Unix-printing world,
> but if the time has come for an XP_LINUX that differs from XP_UNIX, or
> even XP_LINUX_GNOME, then I'd be willing to hear a pitch for it.
>
>> Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
>> desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for
>> engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
>> Firefox, and Thunderbird.
>
>
> I *humbly* submit that that group is not the right set of people to be
> discussing the future of the printing model in Firefox and
> Thunderbird. By all means put together a proposal for improving how we
> print on Linux, but please don't think that it will be accepted simply
> by fiat (even my mighty fiat, ahem!). I also caution against what
> we've seen as a pattern so far, which is "well, then we'll just patch
> our build", for various reasons that aren't really appropriate for this
> list.
>
> Mike
>
>
I think, the Firefox/Thunderbird dialog has to be replaced urgently, I
do not know how the original one looks like (I am on Mandriva 2006), but
when one clicks on "Properties" and gets a cryptic printing command line
to edit, I think this is far from user-friendly. Then a long list of PPD
options is already MUCH better.
What are the exact rquirements for a Firefox/Thunderbird printing
dialog? Who in the Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird team is responsible for
the dialog? So that one can talk with him.
Till