GNOME: People or Objects?

Recently, I'd had this book recommended to me. I immediately picked the book up, and read straight through it today. I strongly recommend it for anyone who is currently, or wishes to get involved in, the open source community. If we all take the advice within to heart, and get out of the box, so to speak, we would get a lot more done.

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box is a great read, yet short and to the point. It's less than 200 pages, and I read it in the span of only a couple of hours. If it's not on your bookshelf, put it there. Everyone should read it.

Taking the content to heart in terms of usability and accessibility development, would be especially helpful in the GNOME desktop. Currently we treat end users, and users with disability, as lower class objects, rather than real people. Making the user interface better and more accessible for anyone other than us is something we often see as a burden. It slows us down, and gets in the way. We blame accessibility technologies for problems in design and code. We need to just treat these users as people too, and fully understand how they currently use the desktop, and what changes would make using the desktop better for them, as well as for us. We need to fix these problems in design and code, not avert blame, or justify them with mediocre workarounds that the users themselves can accomplish.

A good example of this is the argument about a problem in git, which hp and jclinton were having on IRC, earlier today. Havoc was explaining how and why it was a problem. Talking about why git should not allow the user to perform such action at all. Jason on the other hand, was simply arguing to justify the behavior, as there are trivial ways to resolve the issue, though such resolution must be performed by anyone using the central repository where the issue becomes a problem. Seeking to justify the behavior doesn't make the behavior any more valid. It just means there are possible workarounds or solutions that can be done, once the problem appears, and is noticed. Seeking to justify the means, just means everyone loses.

That example is great, because if whoever wrote the commands for git did some basic usability testing, and treated users as people instead of objects, the whole issue could probably have just been avoided in the first place. I'm sure there are many more examples I could come up with, especially in GNOME or KDE, but this one was fresh in my mind. And it's a great example of how just relaxing and treating people as people, could help resolve a lot of our conflicts in the community, and make our software much better for everyone.

Syndicated 2008-08-02 00:03:54 (Updated 2008-08-02 01:06:17) from dobey's blog