Thursday, October 24, 2002
	8:12:41 AM   mpt the Weblog of Matthew Thomas Rage, rage against the bloating of the preferences In Havoc Pennington’s usability essay, he described a phenomenon which curses Free software development: Reading dozens of GNOME and Red Hat bugs per day, I find that users ask for a preference by default. If a user is using my app FooBar and they come to something they think is stupid — say the app deletes all their email — it’s extremely common that they’ll file a bug saying “there should be an option to disable eating all my email” instead of one saying “your craptastic junk-heap of an app ate my email.” People just assume that FooBar was designed to eat your email, and humbly ask that you let them turn off this feature they don’t like. This also happens with Mozilla — people assume that a bug is a feature (though given Mozilla’s design, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference), and file a bug report asking for the option to turn it off. For example, for years Mozilla has had occasional bugs where a browser window jumps to the front when it loads a page. They’re hard bugs to track down, and eventually people start thinking they’re deliberate. So again and again and again, they request not that the bug be fixed, but that they be allowed to turn the bug off. Now Ian Hickson documents a related phenomenon: a module owner decides that something should behave a particular way, whereupon someone who disagrees will immediately file a bug report asking for the option to have the opposite behavior. In these cases it doesn’t particularly matter what behavior was chosen — tossing a coin and hard-coding the result would be better overall than providing a user option would. Nevertheless, the prefs dialog becomes mere territory in the battle of wills: Annoying Person Do what I say! Module Owner No. Annoying Person Ok, make it a GUI pref! Module Owner No. Annoying Person Could it be a hidden pref, then? Module Owner No. Annoying Person [feebly] Ok, how about asking the user at install time? Module Owner No. Annoying Person [whimpering] There could be a pref to turn off the pref … Module Owner No. (Ian asked me earlier for an example of the last extreme suggestion, and eventually I found one. Brian Ryner: “I could do a pref to hide [the Mouse Wheel preferences panel] from the prefs page easily enough … Would that be acceptable to everyone?”) Unlike Ian, I don’t find this “disturbing” or “confusing” — it happens often enough that it’s almost certainly a social problem in the community, rather than a psychological or psychiatric problem with the individuals concerned. As with many social problems, it’s difficult to solve, so it’s easier to feign bewilderment — or, as Blake Ross and I do, to make fun of it. http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/05/12#a207 Posted by mpt on 5/12/02; 7:35:40 PM Copyright © mpt.   8:07:36 AM   Expand your infobase Russell Pavlicek October 18, 2002 01:01 PM PST EVERY ONCE in a while, I get a message from someone who says "We had such-and-such problem under Linux. We called our vendor support line. They suggested a couple things that did not help. They said they would look at it, but they could not find an answer. We can't implement unless we can get this solution!" There are a couple of problems here. First, if these accounts are accurate, it would appear that some companies supporting Linux are using an old methodology that assumes that all answers will be found in an in-house infobase or internal engineering organization. Any support organization running that way is long overdue for an overhaul. Software that was born on the Web sometimes needs to be supported with information gleaned from the Web. If you rely solely on in-house information, you will eventually hit a brick wall. The second problem is that clearly a large number of people in the IT industry -- both support specialists and IT techs alike -- do not seem to know how to use the Internet well. Now, I understand that sounds like an immensely stupid and arrogant statement. With so many IT professionals "living" on the Internet, how can they possibly not know how to use it? As implausible as this sounds, I've begun to accept that this must be the case. I've lost track of how many times I have found answers to supposedly unsolvable "showstopper" problems in under 30 minutes. It's not a matter of technical expertise. Half the time I know less about the subject matter than the person with the problem. And it's not a matter of tools. I can find most solutions with little more than Google and a decent Internet connection. No, the Web-based nature of open source has highlighted a real problem. The computer industry can no longer afford the luxury of technical myopia. IT professionals need to learn how to locate answers on the Web. Support vendors have to stop relying solely on pat answers in their own infobase and learn how to search for answers. It's time to apply 21st-century solutions to 21st-century problems. People who cut their teeth on open source are often quite good at these skills. The amount of information on the Net regarding open-source software is astounding. But finding the precise answer can take a little effort. Still, many open-source folks are quite clever at seemingly pulling answers from thin air. Unfortunately, some support organizations -- even those supporting open-source products -- don't seem to have enough of these people. And that is a major problem. In today's Internet-driven world, we can't afford a single support organization's single point of failure. The Web has gobs of support information, even for many closed-source products. And a company looking for an edge will learn how to use this information effectively. Those who rely on 20th-century methods will run behind. Contact Contributing Editor Russell Pavlicek at pavlicek@linuxprofessionalsolutions.com or log on to his forum at www.infoworld.com/os. http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/10/21/021021opsource.xml Copyright 2001 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

© Copyright 2002 Eric Hartwell. Last update: 11/5/2002; 4:05:48 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.