Understanding is the Essence of Intelligence

In his review of the NEO FreeRunner, an open-source mobile phone running on Linuxoids, Wayne MacPhail, tells us that Open-Source sucks at designing usable products:

Physical buttons are placed in ergonomically awkward positions, the drop down menus are slow and the screen scrolling is lethargic and unresponsive. This would be a phone you would use as a prop in a comedy sketch about bad Russian Cold War products.

... GIMP, a popular open source photo editor is to Photoshop what an elephant is to Martha Graham.

There are a few design successes in Open-Source though, such as Firefox, but for the most part, Open-Source still remains designed by engineers for engineers. That explains why most of the successes of Open-Source have been on servers and language tools which are only used by engineers and hard-core network administrators.

The typical Open-Source is a tool that can do it all, but has so many undocumented options all over the place that you need to be an expert and spend hours to figure out how to do basic things. Mac OS X is a good example showing that less is more as far as design is concerned and that good design can transform an unknown (by the masses) open-source project into a successful product that everyone can use. We have to recognize that picking and laying-out the right features is difficult and essential for end-users rather than providing everything and let end-users figure out how to use them.

Jean-Hugues tells me that this is why we need to act like artists, not like engineers. The problem, Jean-Hugues, is that we are engineers, not artists!

Chris Messina goes as far as to write that "open source design” is an oxymoron and that "Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head"..

So to fix the problem we need to hire Open-Source designers.

Which leads me to the next question, why are there so many Open-Source engineers for so few Open-Source designers?

Open-Source has gained tremendous popularity since Microsoft became so dominant that it started to stifle competition and innovation while working against standards such as SVG, which continues to be missing in IE8, 7 years after SVG 1.0 became a recommendation from the W3C.

On the other hand, designers have, during the same period, enjoyed a relatively open market and have so far not felt the urgency to join the Open-Source movement.

For this to change open-source developers need to seek designers early in the design phase of open-source projects. The same goes for documentation and marketing in general but good design would go a long way towards improving Open-Source adoption by the rest of them (end-users).

Seeking a designer does not mean picking a really good engineer and assigning him or her to the design task, it means looking for really good designers to help really good engineers provide usable open-source products.

There must be designers willing to work on open-source projects, to find them we need to engage them, some of them may be found from Open Designs, OSWD, CSS Zen Garden or Open Web Design. These are all for web design but a lot of applications today are web-based anyways and I'm sure these designers could design better hardware and software that most of us would.

To attract designers we need to empower them so that they own the design and have the final say as what goes in and what does not. We also need to let designers pick the design tools they want even if these are not open-source.