LinuxMCE and Usability
Some months ago I discovered LinuxMCE, a software suite that sits on top of Kubuntu and provides a complete media centre/smarthome/voip/home security solution with truly world class features. I got to rediscover it in mid September this year after I watched this demonstration video. The project is impressive with its rich feature list, its expandability and integration, but — as is the case with so many open source projects — it disappoints in its lack of æsthetics, ergonomy and usability: I find its video-enhanced wizard kitsch and unintuitive. The fact that for some options you have to resort to a completely different form-based settings input system is also a token of how clueless with regards to usability its designers were. Moreover, I find its menus annoyingly cluttered, ugly and in stark contrast to its generally minimalist approach that allows a user to navigate and use the system with only a few buttons. The software originally comes from a commercial project by a well-known company that sells it as an expensive turnkey hardware solution costing in the thousands of euros.
Software usability and ergonomy may be harder than it seems, but good software design is — arguably — a harder, yet orthogonal challenge. LinuxMCE seems to be doing so many technical things very well, yet it miserably fails when it comes to producing software that’s useful, beautiful and fun to use. At the same time, some other company sells crippled yet beautiful and usable devices that people love to use, even if they’ve got 1/10th of what a similarly sized device running LinuxMCE could do!
Which is a shame. Nevertheless, this is an open source project, developed by two people that have practically nothing to gain from it and their hard work is very much appreciated. I can only dream how great it’d be if a team of talented UI and usability designers got together, be it alone as individuals in the scope of an open source project or in a more organised fashion in the scope of one or more small companies, and fixed all that’s wrong with LinuxMCE. What a fantastic opportunity this is to create the ultimate media centre platform and allowing a whole ecosystem of products, services and add-ons to be developed for LinuxMCE appliances. Open, extendable, functional and beautiful. LinuxMCE is definitely the first two. Apple TV is the last two. Guess which one wins?
LinuxMCE is a great project with a lot of potential. For the time being it suffers from many of the same problems inflicting the majority of projects in the open source world: usability, æsthetics, design. I hope this is going to change soon and let the project get the place it deserves.
Unfortunately you’re 100% right. It’s a common property of a considerable part of open source community software designers to focus on the technical aspects of the end product and not its aesthetics, ergonomy and usuability.
Major market players (like the one you mentioned ;-)…) devote tremendous amount of time and resources on the look and feel of the application whether it is hardware or software.
Consumers tend to prefer from two products, sharing similar specifications and properties, the one that’s more fashionable and easy to use. Just think of your household applicances and you get the point.
It’s sad to say that the Human Computer Interaction and UI design courses are not key part (if they exist at all) of the most university level computer science and engineering programs. When we designed software for our thesis or course projects, the user interface part was not that important as functionality and quality of the solution approach was marked.
The great stake is to attract talented graphic artists and UI design professionals to contribute to the open source software initiative. Quite difficult I assume but not impossible at all…