On Developers and User Friendliness
Frustration is ripe here- I wished to use ONE open source script for a regional site I wanna do. After digging and asking questions I was ALMOST ready to use the Xaraya content management system script- until I started reading the directions. I had posted some questions to the user group, they’d told me in answer that the CMS script would indeed do what I wished. So I tried a test setup. Though the people in the group are great, I began to realize why it’s a very small group. They told me which “modules” would do what I wanted, and I started reading instructions on xaraya setup . . . I feel like I need a xaraya dictionary and then need to learn the xaraya language to get up and running with this thing. I’m wading in XarayaJargon up to my armpits. HELP!
I have no clue how I found this post from Jeffrey Veen, but finding it came at about the time when I was starting into my screaming and headbashing phase. Jeffrey’s post about the unfriendliness of CMS scripts for users, and the resulting comments from both sides of the fence make a well worthwhile read for anyone involved in either developing or using software/scripts- and this is not limited to the open source web development community, though the problems seem a bit more prevalent there, probably since open source people don’t hire consultants to put together user groups and focus groups or do usability studies, which at least sometimes succeed in making a product more usable. Sometimes.
My feelings after reading this whole post and the ensuing comments (yes, I did read down to the very bottom . . . a LONG read) was that it’s possible that both web developers and code users might benefit from some sort of STANDARDS. So that a piece of code that extends usability, which is called “extension” by the Mozilla developers, “plug-in” by the WordPress developers, “module” by the Xaraya developers and probably twenty other things by other groups would all be called BY THE SAME NAME. Such a simple idea. Yet I also know that once you get into groups who develop standards that creates a problem all its own . . .
