Thoughts on Ergonomics in Gnome/GTK Software

Ergonomics is about the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize overall interaction. In short, ergonomics is about making things comfortable and efficient to work with. This also applies to software design and development, or at least it should. Companies and projects have been thinking and researching ergonomics in software development pretty much since the beginning, even if that was just a developer thinking about where best to place this or that button in his program. The GNOME project had the Usability Project from 2001 to 2011 and now apparently has design teams to cover usability. GNOME also came up with the HIG – the Human Interface Guidelines. So you would think the GNOME world is well prepared in terms of software ergonomics as far as human to interface interactions go.