[gobolinux-users] Fwd: Multiple intelligences: Further clues to Linux uptake - 4 (Final)

[Rex Teague]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Multiple intelligences: Further clues to Linux uptake - 4 
(Final)
Date: Wednesday 01 November 2006 06:50
From: Rex Teague <elists234 at slingshot.co.nz>
To: linux-users at it.canterbury.ac.nz

Eric Raymond has joined the board at Linspire/Freespire motivated by
 the idea Linux on the deskstop has to jump into the 32 to 64 bit
transition. His reckoning is; the transition will be done by 2008 and
 if Linux misses the bus it will be relegated to a _desktop_ minority.
 Since joining the board, Linspire has removed the entrance
 subscription to their "Click 'n Run" service.

ESR empathises with Aunt Tillie - the archetypal nontechnical user. In
his March 2006 essay "The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror
Story" he is highly critical of his fellow geeks ie. predominantly
linguistic learners! An excerpt:

"I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the
Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why
nontechnical people run screaming from Unix. This is all the more
frustrating because the developers of CUPS have obviously tried hard to
produce an accessible system — but the best intentions and effort have
led to a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so
undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient
Sanskrit.

"GUI tools and voluminous manuals are not enough. You have to think
about what the actual user experiences when he or she sits down to do
actual stuff, and you have to think about it from the user's point of
view. The CUPS people, despite good intentions, have utterly failed at
this. I'm going to anatomize this failure in detail, because there are
lessons here that other open-source projects would do well to heed. The
point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS
people — it's also to beat up on every other open-source designer who
does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a
slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI. Watch and learn... "

The whole saga is at http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

That's it folks, I trust I have made my point that one hat doesn't fit
all with computing usability. After many years designing and building
machines, the Howard Gardner's "Multiple Intelligences" theory nicely
answers a vast array of usability questions.

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