On Saturday 27 November 2004 11:21, Avi Alkalay wrote: > softwares really excel in usability confort. And I don't think a > commercial software used by millions of people around the world, at > home and at work (Outlook), still has usability bugs. It is pretty > mature by now. Oh, it definitly has usability bugs. For example you cannot search in all address books at once. Auto-completion of email addresses sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. (There are some more, but I don't want to annoy the list with outlook bugs.) > In this case of my father, usability is not "used to", because I > explained all the virus implications of using Outlook, and he used Usability has not much to do with viruses. > Thunderbird for several weeks. It was simply related to how Thunder > organizes information, speed, etc. He finished saing "Don't worry > about security, I have an anti-virus". Thunderbird is still beta... > hopefully they'll improve it. > > I want to say that again because this is very important: > Usability and Confort of use are not realted to software features (of > course they must have it too), but to the speed things are renderer on > the screen, super beautiful fonts, integration, no bugs on things > related to drag'n'drop, and underlying widgets code, and most of all, > people, psycologists, making tests with regular people on how they > feel using certain software. I feel GNOME is much more usable than any variant of Windows. But continued working on usability is definitly an important part of future development. > Specially about fonts (it is way more relevant than most techies may > think), those Tahoma and Verdana fonts were designed for confort and > to look beautifull on the screen. Luxi Sans (Sans on FC), Bitstream > Vera, and others available on the free world don't have their superior > quality. I experienced regular desktop users migrating from W to L, > and the first thing they want to customize is the fonts. Sans is too > big, Vera is not well hinted, and anti-aliasing is bad for small > sizes. Always when I have to use Windows I get angry about the fonts (especially the fixed "system font" size coming from the Win3 era). I have currently (FC3) nothing to complain about Vera fonts. > About usability tests, Mozilla team probably studied IE usability a > lot, and they worried about removing many menu items, and to mimic > other aspects. So sometimes many options aren't good. For example, on > KDE we have 3 editors that make the same functionality that Window's > Notepad: Kedit, Kwrite and Kate. Confusing? Agreed. -- http://LinuxWiki.org/RonnyBuchmann
