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The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story 17 Mar 2004

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.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

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Ronco Spray-On Usability Thursday, 1 Apr 2004

This one is funny.

Eric S. Raymond — the renowned Linux/Open Source evangelist/essayist — couldn’t figure out how to connect to a shared printer. So he wrote an essay describing the problem (the UI for printer configuration on his Linux system is horrible) and proposing a solution (open source developers should do a better job with UI design). Raymond wrote:

http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability

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The Luxury of Ignorance: Part Deux 22 Mar 2004

A few days ago I uttered a rant on user-interface problems in the Common Unix Printing System. I used it to develop the idea that the most valuable gift you can give your users is the luxury of ignorance — software that works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice users, that they don't have to read documentation or spend time and mental effort to learn about it.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/luxury-part-deux.html