Earthweb’s Bruce Byfield recently wrote about the innovations in KDE 4 and GNOME; the two main Linux desktop platforms. More specifically, he wrote that the upcoming versions of KDE and GNOME were designed with numerous improvements that developers decided to put in because they were “cool” – but which may overcomplicate things for the end user on the desktop, using Linux as an alternative to Windows or Mac as a workhorse machine.
(For the uninitiated, KDE and GNOME are desktop environments that provide a unified “look and feel” among graphical applications running on Linux. It’s similar to the relationship between the Windows XP “look and feel” and the Windows Vista “look and feel” – both do the same thing, but look different and have different functionality. Each desktop environment also provides tools for developing standalone applications – while applications designed to run in KDE will run in GNOME, and vice versa, they are likely to look and feel slightly out of place. The difference is, while XP and Vista are developed by the same company, sequentially, KDE and GNOME are developed by different teams of developers, in parallel, and end-users choose the desktop system that meets their needs. )
The theory is that open-source developers who aren’t working for a paycheck are instead working to either add the features that they think are personally cool, and what they think they’d like to see in a desktop platform. But end-users are more likely to prefer simplicity and familiarity. While “doing new things” is always a bonus, more people would rather focus on using the computer to do the things they already know how to do, and any “new thing” which gets in the way of that is likely to be seen as an annoyance.
From Byfield’s article:
“What innovators and early adopters can easily forget is that they are a minority. Where they are excited by change, most users are uncomfortable with change. Many will reject any change out of hand, no matter how logical or convenient, simply because it is new….
…But what the innovators are forgetting is that, for the average user, the desktop is not the destination. Nor is the destination even the application…. Rather, the destination is the user’s purpose: finishing the quarterly report or IMing a girlfriend. As they focus on the task at hand, users may not want to linger on the desktop to play with its features.”
This is one of the reasons that we often harp on having network tools that can provide the necessary information to the right audience. The network engineer is concerned with throughput and latency, the CIO more concerned with how much money good throughput and low latency save, if any.
Real human usability factors are often as important, or more important, in developing software products – any software development company often has specialists in user interface designing the look and feel of products – NetQoS is no exception. But user interface design isn’t just about making the functionality “look pretty” – it’s finding better ways to present information – even if that means finding a “less clever” way to present information in favor of a “more parseable” way to do so.
I don’t know if there’s as much of a disconnect between IT and the business as there used to be; I think that over the past few years, more executives see the value of IT because more people in IT are explaining the value of IT in terms that matter to business executives. But the quickest way to encourage that disconnect is by giving the C-level executive information he neither needs nor cares about – it’s a quick way for him to tune out anything important that you may have to say.
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