Usability
Added 31 Jul 2008
Since GNOME v2.0, a key focus of the project has been usability. As a part of this, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) were created, which is an extensive guide for creating quality, consistent and usable GUI programs, covering everything from GUI design to recommended pixel-based layout of widgets.
During the v2.0 rewrite, many settings were deemed to be of little or no value to the majority of users and were removed. For instance, the preferences section of the Panel were reduced from a dialog of six tabs to one with two tabs. Havoc Pennington summarized the usability work in his 2002 essay "Free Software UI", emphasizing the idea that all preferences have a cost, and it's better to "unbreak the software" than to add a UI preference to do that:[11]
| “ | A traditional free software
application is configurable so that it has the union of all features
anyone's ever seen in any equivalent application on any other
historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all
applications that anyone's ever seen on any historical platform (Emacs
*cough*).
Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits - and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don't understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar. |
” |
Some people believe that GNOME should be more functional. One of these is Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, who commented in a usability-related discussion on the GNOME usability mailing list:[12]
| “ | 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. |