Most people suck at programming. Therefore, most usability experts will suck att programming. Most people suck att usability and interaction design. Therefore, most programmers will suck at it too. This is not surprising really.

What i meant to say with my post is that it’s not the programming skills that make programmers suck at usability. It’s the fact that they don’t know usability.

Maybe there is some truth to your statements when we’re talking about software using concepts that are very familiar to programmers but not other people. One example might be a GUI for hardware configuration or a package installer like synaptic.But the concepts in Pro Audio tools are actually more familiar to the average user of those programs than to the average programmer. Ask a programmer what soft-knee compression is and i doubt you’ll get an answer. Musicians are geeks too .

But i have real trouble taking that article seriously when he is praising Cubase and then goes on to complain about usability. A lot of people using Pro Audio tools seem to swear by them and are so used to them that they don’t see their flaws.

And i can’t see how he missed the fact that OSS audio tools are _severely_ lacking in sound quality. To the point of beeing completely unusable even if you can stand the UI.

Finally, the best user interface is no user interface at all. To make things “Just Work” you don’t need usability people, you need a change in attitude among programmers. Of course for a lot of things there has to be a UI, and then the usability people are valuable. I think GNOME has been very successful in creating a culture of “usability matters”, and if you see the UI:s that GNOME programmers create and compare that to the average OSS UI five years ago the difference is huge.

You just need to keep on working on that, make sure that the usability people feel welcome and are taken seriously. But you also need to make programmers better at usability, because frankly there wont be enough usability experts around.

Jono mentioned this about a month ago on the LUGRadio forums.
See this lugradio forums thread “Moving to an Open Source editing program for LUGRadio”
http://forums.lugradio.org/viewtopic.php?t=1071
I ranted in that thread as “underscan”.

A snippet from my response:
“Please for the love of ease of use read this http://apreche.net/blog/2005/05/21#linuxsound , he is making his case for better Linux audio support for multichannel use, specifically games, but this is only 1 example of how ALSA works but is just not good enough. We can have the slickest GUI that puts ProTools & Cubase to shame. We can have virtual instruments & effects that users can edit & share because it is FOSS. We can have it all & it won’t matter until ALSA is cleaned up, streamlined & fixed. Today we have 2 channel (stero right & left) support in Linux that works OK. I won’t even suggest that it works fine or great since there are common HW audio chipsets that have problems with ALSA. The Linux user can not take advantage of current audio HW features because practically all of drivers for generic 5.1 channel audio chipsets/cards built on the motherboard that are shipped in today’s PC are nowhere near being feature complete or stable as compared to Windows drivers. Gstreamer, a real sweet project, will not fix this since GS sits above the HW and above the drivers. “

About being a user and making UI suggestions – well it boils down to the question what makes somone an expert. Some go to school for it, other just take to it. This is the same with code. If your suggestions follow a pattern of quality remarks that do make the software more usable than you can count yourself as an expert of sorts. But there are too many people who don’t look at the bigger picture but still belive they know what a good interface is and all they do is complain on the lists. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all. Of course in line with my earlier statements if there is a person who is specially trained and looks at these issues objectively through studdies and scientific methods we should in most cases deffer to their judgement.

Which is exactly what opensource Gungirl Sequencer is, and which Ardour can be used as (it does have a looping brush).

I personally don’t. I’m quite happy with pro software like ardour. But the author is saying that simple solutions that ‘just work’ are needed.

No free software from what I can see is trying to be Garageband. Maybe audacity to some extent.

In what aspect do you want free software to behave like Garageband?

The only software which I would exclude from this is Garageband. (And between you and me, it’s not that good either. Apple seem to have this idea that giving everything odd icons makes software ‘usable’. Oh. clicking on this picture of an eye changes the view to a list of available loops. That makes sense. It took me about half an hour to even figure out it had an onscreen keyboard.) No free software from what I can see is trying to be Garageband. Maybe audacity to some extent. So I think complaining that free audio software doesn’t ‘just work’ isn’t valid.

Pro audio software generally does not ‘just work’. It is complex stuff whose user interface is tuned to people who use the software day in day out and need a fast workflow.

The way I see it, no platform can offer anything to compete with jack at the moment. Add to that the fact that there are LOTS of very good jack apps out there and you can do pretty much anything on linux. If someone wants to create a Garageband-alike ‘easy’ application for jack, that would be great.

Michael F: Wow. It was just a matter of launching jackd for me.

Do I have to immediately stop producing usability improvement suggestions and drawing dialogs just because i’m not an expert?

Do I have to leave developers alone with their ideas what is best for users and try to get used to their point of view or quit Linux audio?

Never listen to “self declared” people. We have plenty of experts who have credentials behind them.

Thanks for replying. Did you read the article? From Jono’s point of view functionality is not lacking, it is usability and I have to agree. I know bands who use Apple’s garage band for the first stage of production and then move on to more complex software. Complexity does not always have to mean bad UI and usability though.

Users do make horrible UI designers. That’s why we have designers. My point was that we must listen for our users needs – smart people who want to get work done. This is often done not directly but through usability labs and studies.

As for saying that programmers can never be designers I would never make that statement. What I said is they shouldn’t. As with the case of all blanket statements there are edge cases. However I do believe we need to put our faith in the OSS designers who are trained to think about this stuff more than programmers get to. Brian Clark and Seth Nickell are two who I highly respect and work with (and yes they both can program but wouldn’t call themselves programmers).

I was once in a jury pool for some case. The lawyer asked us if we heard medical testimony from a Doctor and a business man was brought in to refute the evidence who’s testimony would you give more weight to? The funny things is most people said the same weight should be applied to each. People wanted to seem fair and show no favoritism. The truth is, always defer to the expert. Yes he could be talking out of his ass no matter how many degrees the person has but more than likely he is going to have more knowledge of the subject than anyone else.