[mythtv-users] Why Free Software has poor usability ?

[Matt S.]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> Param Singh wrote:
>> Interesting article :: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how
>> to improve it
>> ============================================================
>> Link :: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability
>> ============================================================
>>
>> Major Points in the article
>>
>> * Weak incentives for usability.
>> * Few good designers.
>> * Design suggestions often aren't invited or welcomed.
>>
>
> Well those first 3 certainly do not apply to the MythTV project.
>
> beww

You are joking right?  These first 3 defintely apply to myth and if
you don't think that, then that's exactly the kind of behavior that
this article is pointing out.  I mean, the motto that I've heard for
the last 4 years is "for developers, by developers" and as the article
points out, developers aren't designers.  I mean, I keep rather quite
on these lists, but I read every single commit that goes into SVN and
much of the stuff on both the -users and developers list.  I can't
count the number of times I've even heard many of the excellent
developers of mythtv mention that their not forte is not design or
usability - it's coding.

*Usability - could be WAY better.  I would never want to deploy myth
to someone who wasn't technical like me.  However, I like it, because
I am a power user.  But, usability has never been a primary focus of
the project, it's always been secondary to functionality.  In fact, go
search the archives and you'll get nearly 500+ emails on usability:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/engine?list=mythtv&do=search_results&search_forum=forum_1&search_string=usability&search_type=AND
not to mention I remember a thread from a couple years ago where
someoen was offering to do usability testing on myth because they felt
usability sucked, but it wasn't really welcomed - I think it might
have been this thread:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/158724?search_string=usability%20test;#158724
or this great example:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/172094?search_string=usability%20assessment;#172094
(couldn't find the whole thread on Gossamer).

Not to mention that as extensible as current mythweather is, it's got
to be one of the worst offenders of usability I've ever seen... I'm
sure it can be salvaged, but it sure isn't as nice as "enter your zip
code and/or city" and get your weather.  To get weather radar maps
that was of my region, I had to go out, look at the source of
weather.com and copy and paste into an xml file.  Yea, that's NOT a
good example of usability.  Also, the data rendors pretty horribly
(design issues).  I'm not picking on anyone, just the way it is and I
know it'll get better with time.

*Few Designers - explain to me why MythUI has been ticket #12 in trac
for over 3 years, listed with a priority of "Blocker" and a severity
of "High" and has had it's milestone transitioned over 3-4 versions
(http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/12)?  I think Stuart and a few
other developers have really taken the batton this time and are
working hard, and I'm really excited that it'll finally be coming in
.22!  Also, who here wonders why we don't get much love for existing
and new themes?  I mean, Justin stepped up, but that's just 1 man and
he had to back off because it was too much for one person to handle
the entire design and maintenance of themes.  Even then, his themes
were included in trunk, but aren't maintained the same as the "core"
themes.  Very frustrating that these great themes don't get the same
respect and updates that myththemes and the standard themes gets.

*Design suggestions often aren't invited or welcomed - Um, I would say
this, while most folks might not want to admit it, have plauged myth
since the begining.  This was always Issac's little experiment that
just grew, and grew, and then only a few core developers really have a
say in what goes and what doesn't.  How many of the feature
suggestions have been implemented from the wiki
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Feature_Wishlist?  Developers of
myth implement features THEY want/need, bug reports are the only ones
that generally acted on unless you do all the work yourself and submit
a full functioning patch for a feature enhancement.  EVEN if you do
that, I've seen great patches sit and get stale in trac like Mark's
mutli-channel audio patch which sat in trac for over 2 years before
being included (http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/1104).  Or something
like the pretty cool auto-fill/leterbox feature that's been in trac
for nearly 6 months, ready to be commited
(http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/4872). In fact, and I'm not saying
I care one way or another on this subject, but I saw a thread
recentely where someone wanted to know about BitTorrent integration
and was promptly told to cease and dissist because Isaac already said
the feature would never go in.  That's Isaac's call, I suppose, but
that's just one of many I've seen over the years.  I respect the fact
that there are people making calls like that, but in general, I would
say that F/OSS projects like mythtv don't compare to the openess or
success or "user requests" that projects like asterisk, GAIM, etc have
had... of course, this particular point was on design and not code,
but they overlap greatly.


On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 12:41 PM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Param Singh <mithu.singh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Have you never worked on commercial software? I think all of these
>>>> could apply to any commercial software I worked on, plus more.
>>
>>>> I believe most of these apply to Microsoft software.
>>
>>
>> IMO, the notion behind sharing this article was to discuss if we ( as
>> mythtv community ) are lacking in any of those points mentioned in the
>> article; rather than pointing fingers and drawing comparisons.
>>
>
> I fully believe that MythTV suffers from none of the above problems.
>
> John


As much as I respect the mythtv developers, the project, and in
general I'm a happy user... I just can't believe that's true.  I want
to give them all the credit I can, but saying the mythtv world is
perfect is just pointless.  No project is perfect and EVERY F/OSS
project could learn something from that article.  I don't think it
does the project any good to ignore suggestions for improvement.

Let's look at the rest of the bullets:
* Usability is hard to measure. - True
* Coding before design. - I think this is the #1 issue with myth's
usability/design.  Need to understand "form and function"
* Too many cooks. -  Pretty true, this is hard for all F/OSS projects
with a decentralized team.  This is a category where commerical
software will (almost) always win.
* Chasing tail-lights. -  I don't think myth is a huge offender of this...
* Scratching their own itch. - I think this is the #1 explanaition for
how myth got to where it is today.  "For developers, by developers"
(http://www.mail-archive.com/mythtv-dev@mythtv.org/msg14906.html)
* Leaving little things broken. - I see this all the time in myth,
things that don't impact the developers, so they don't fix it...
"patches welcome", think of the multi-record feature that lots of
folks in EU wanted, they had to bounty up to convience the developers
to invest the time to do it - even though that was more of an
enhancement than a fix.
* Placating people with options. - Seriously, do I even need to point
out the hundreds of discussions on simplifying settings?  Also, what
about the "hidden" options that are only available by directly editing
the database.
* Fifteen pixels of fame - I don't think myth suffers from this
* Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth. - Most
developers use IRC, but that's about it.  Most work is done on an
individual basis.
* Release early, release often, get stuck. - haha, I don't think myth
has this problem, BUT there could be design specifications.  I think
the developers are doing this properly for .22 with prioritizing
mythui and QT4 migration.
* Mediocrity through modularity. - no comments
* Gated development communities - Definitely!

Anyway - I saw this linked on slashdot and thought the same thing.  I
think someone even posted a comment mentioning mythtv in comparison
with other F/OSS offerings as an example of a project that could
benefit with better design/usability practices.

I hope the developers can take some of this to heart.  I know they're
all extremely talented coders, but design and usability are a
different beast.

Thanks!
Matt