ESR: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story

“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…”

Complete
Story