Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Geek Usability

Here’s a shining example of “Geek Usability”: the website for GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s a nice photo retouching software in the spirit of Photoshop, but distributed freely.

With Geek Usability, I’m actually referring to something which is hard to use because it’s too much tech-oriented. Now, if you don’t mention “tech words”, neither nerd nor “average” user will have a problem understanding you. But if you do use tech words and aim at developers first in structuring the website, the average user will face some barriers. Therefore, I think any site that’s aimed at making its product more popular for any user should put the average user in focus first, and link to more detailed tech information when necessary.

But let me explain, and start at the beginning. I’m entering “gimp” into Google because I want to install this on my Windows PC – I’m assuming that’s what most users will want to do as soon as the product goes mainstream – and after choosing the top result I’m landing on the GIMP homepage. From here on, I will count one step whenever I click a link or am forced to scroll one screen down on my resolution (1152x864 pixels, that is):

• Start: The homepage contains an introductory sentence (which included the word “downloading” already, but it’s not linked). It goes on to speak about how to write GIMP plug-ins, about how to get developer releases (we don’t want that), and how to get involved as Usability Expert (I gave that a try, but landed on page asking me to enter my email without offering me an input box, but let’s not digress).
• Step 1: Clicking on “Download” in the left-side navigation takes me to the “Downloads” page. But the page starts listing sources. There are file names like “gimp-2.2.8.tar.gz” and MD5 sums (4147deec71221b3110f259901bbd2f27) popping up. OK, I scroll down a bit.
• Step 2: Further down the page there we have the “Binaries.” (Why that word? I want to find the download. We already understood that word.) Unix is listed first, then follows Windows. We’ll excuse this order because one of GIMP’s killer features is it’s cross-platform, but usually, Windows should be put first (I’m not talking about religion or taste here, but about which is the most popular Operating System in terms of the user base). I’m clicking on “GIMP for Windows.”
• Step 3: Yes, there’s a link to “Automated Installer.” Let’s click on it.
• Step 4: I’m now on a page titled “Installers for GIMP for Windows.” This looks good, I wanted to be here all the time. There’s another introductory sentence telling me “You can download installers for the GIMP ...” and so on (the word “download” is, once more, not linked). I look around on the page before finally clicking on “Download” on the left.

• Step 5: I feel like I’m almost there to actually download “the GIMP.” The page starts talking about a “GTK+2 for Windows” download. I’m not sure I need this. I’ll try the other link, which says “The Gimp for Windows.” I’ll ignore the text on the bottom of the download box reading “MD5: 2b6380964beb2ab347da18930a860d62” and hope I won’t need that info.
• Step 6: I’m on that SourceForge page which asks me to select a mirror. Yes, if you read my blog, you’ll likely have been on that page a thousand times, just as every developer. But for someone who’s new to it, it can actually be quite confusing, because it lacks that underlined thing we instantly recognize as a link, and it also asks me to make another choice. But I know it doesn’t matter which location I click, so I go for Saint Petersburg, Russia, which is listed first.
• Step 7: I’m there! After some seconds, the download starts (when I run the setup later on it turns out I should indeed have downloaded GTK+, but let’s ignore that as the software itself isn’t my point here).

I think that was much too complicated to download the Windows setup. Now I don’t want to put GIMP down. Actually, it makes me sad the setup isn’t easier, because I wish all the best for this program. Nor am I saying GIMP shouldn’t have a strong aim at developers (it definitely should, as it’s open-source). All it should do is allow new users without deep knowledge of the product or its technology to give it a try easily. (That includes graphic artists with or without deep technology knowledge.) It can still put up all the information up to any level of detail by linking to it. Or is it intentionally techspeak to satisfy a certain geek ethos? In that case, I think the ethos might need some rethinking.

In contrast, here’s a page of mine with a software to download. It’s Netpadd, a programmer’s editor (so the page is definitely aimed at programmers, but that doesn’t mean I tried to make downloading Netpadd harder), and I’ll start with the first result for “Netpadd” in Google (which is the homepage):

• Start: There is an introductory sentence, and the first link – which is bold, blue and underlined – reads “Netpadd files” (the full sentence is “Just download the Netpadd files (August 2005, source included) and start the executable.

(I was actually using SourceForge for Netpadd as well for a while, but then decided against it because their download pages are not simple enough.)

Another page of mine is Questml.com. I’m not taking these sites as prime usability examples. There are many easy-to-use sites like these, and I actually might want to improve a thing or two if I’d look over them in detail as they are both some years old. But again, the downloading of the QML Editor (which is also aimed at least 50% at developers, as it contains a full XML-based programming language) is much easier than downloading the GIMP:

• Start: On this introductory page, I answer the questions “What is QML?”, and “How can I create quests?”. I emphasize there is not necessarily programming involved. (A programmer will thus understand there is indeed programming possible for power users, while a software novice understands she can actually handle this program). The first (blue, and underlined) link on the page reads “QML-Edit software.”
• Step 1: The download page contains another introductory sentence (a visitor might come from a search engine or nother external page, so information on the location must be repeated here). Then there’s a blue, underlined and bold link reading “QML-Edit2”, and that’ll trigger the browser’s download dialog.

The QML homepage still contains a lot of “geek” information (hey, I’m a geek myself). As a difference to the GIMP homepage – and many other homepages as well, though rarely this extreme – I’m linking to it in an “inverted pyramid” approach (I didn’t invent this; it basically means “put important information first, and get deeper into the topic later on”). If you have your own website, try looking at it from this point of view; “At which sentence do I lose the attention of a newbie? At which page do I lose the attention of a semi-tech oriented person? At which do I lose the person with a mild interest in programming?” See, you will never have to ask yourself “Where do I lose the internet geek?” because it just so happens the geek will hack the site if necessary to get the wanted information or download.

The only thing you need to worry about is to lose someone you might have something to offer for. And if all you have to offer is the source code to something, fine, then don’t aim for newbies, as they wouldn’t know what to do with this anyway. If all you have to offer is a tutorial on the new features of your Pythonperl programming language, fine, better put up a warning this isn’t going to be light on the brain. But if you do offer something of value for non-geeks, then put them to service first... and worry about MD5 sums later.

Geek Usability by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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