OSS GUI Design Guide 26Nov04

Benjamin Roe shows in his OSS Quick GUI Design Guide five key points of user interface design: "The user is not using your application", "Fitt's Law", "Unnecessary interference", "Use the power of the computer", "Make items easy to distinguish and find".

Abstract:

The Open Source software world is full of excellent software. High-quality F/OSS software is available for virtually any task a computer user could want to do, from word-processing to web-serving. There is one small problem with much of this huge array of software: it is often far more difficult to use than it could be. Professional UI designers tell us that user interfaces should be the first thing designed when we come to develop an application, and that programmers are incapable of doing this kind of design. They say it can only be done by the professional UI experts; OSS projects don't have access to these kind of people, and therefore can never be truly usable.

This doesn't mean we should just give up on UI design. From the quality of many commercial applications' UIs, having usability experts on staff doesn't guarantee a good interface either. Effort, knowledge and thought by any developer can improve the usability of an application greatly. We may only find a local optimum rather than the global, but even that is a step in the right direction.

After years of struggling with these problems, I thought I would write down a short list of five things that we OSS developers should consider when designing our application's GUI. These are drawn from my experience in using and writing OSS software and my reading of a few very interesting books and web sites on the subject. These works are listed in the references — they are all excellent reading for any developer interested in usability issues.

Usable GUI Design: A Quick Guide for F/OSS Developers