What is user friendliness?April 29th 2007
What is user friendliness?What is "user-friendliness"? Everyone else seems to have a pretty good idea of what it means. And they all say that Windows is user-friendly and Linux is not.
Well, Windows is certainly novice-friendly. It's an easy system to learn when you know nothing about computers to begin with. What makes it so easy to pick up is that you can do things in Windows without actually having to understand what you're doing.
It was designed this way of course because the purpose of Windows is to sell Windows. Bill Gates never made any secret of his ambition: a computer on every desk and Windows running on all of them. It needs to be easy to pick up if its market is to keep growing and so everything else has been sacrificed to this aim.
In the Linux community there is a saying: "Ignorance is short-lived; knowledge lasts forever." What this means is that any user of any software is only a novice for a short time. Then he or she becomes an expert and remains so. A corollary is that at a given time most users of any system are experts. Novices are a minority.
Now a genuinely user-friendly system should surely be friendly to the majority of its users so "user-friendly" really equals "expert-friendly". Of course this does not mean that you have to be actively unfriendly to novices; it merely means that, if you want to make good software and not just good sales figures, novice-friendliness should not be the overriding criterion.
By this standard Windows fails completely. Windows "power users" certainly do work faster than novices but mainly because they type faster and have better navigation skills. For example they know exactly where on the screen a particular button or menu item falls and can often click on it without having to locate it by eye. They also tend to use keyboard short cuts more than novices do. But these shortcuts are the only tools that Windows provides to allow experts to take advantage of their expertise.
By contrast expert Linux users often work in quite different ways from novices. Novices tend to do everything graphically. They launch commands from the desktop and choose their options by clicking on checkboxes and radio buttons in a series of dialog boxes. This is easy but it is also slow and cumbersome. In Windows you have to do it this way no matter how much of an expert you are. After the umpteenth time you begin to wonder where this famous user-friendliness has got to.
Linux experts switch between graphics and command line depending on which is faster and more economical for the job they have in mind. With a typed command, all the options you want can be written in explicitly. Then you create a short alias for the whole thing so that you won't ever have to type it again, or you link it to a shortcut on the desktop so that you can use it in graphical mode too. If you find that you routinely use a particular sequence of commands, you can automate the process by putting them into a shell script, then link that to a desktop shortcut.
Linux experts can also speed up their work by making their computers run faster. They switch off background services that they don't use or change from slow and bulky GUIs like Gnome and KDE to smaller, faster ones like xfce. You can't do that sort of thing in Windows.
"User-friendly" should also mean "Internet-friendly" because we all use the Internet these days, if only to send and receive email. A user-friendly system should be one that allows users to feel safe when they surf. It should protect them by shrugging off attacks, not force them to protect themselves by buying additional software.
Again Windows fails the test. Its susceptibility to worms and viruses is notorious. So you need to obtain a firewall, an antivirus program and a spyware blocker. You also need to update your antivirus each time you go online which itself makes you feel anxious. It's a bit like putting on a bullet-proof vest; you feel safer immediately afterwards but the fact that it is necessary to do it makes you feel less safe in the long run.
A user-friendly system should not crash. There is nothing more unfriendly than the infamous Blue Screen of Death — unless it's a total freeze, when you can't even reboot with CTRL-ALT-DEL because your keyboard doesn't work any more. And there is nothing like a system crash for making users lose confidence in themselves. They wonder what they did to cause it and worry about inadvertently doing it again. It always amazes me that the designers of Windows didn't put more work into making it bomb-proof when they claim to value user-friendliness so highly.
Finally for many users — not all — a user-friendly system needs to be comprehensible. I believe this is specially important for older users. You'll be much less nervous if you know what you're doing, why it works and how to fix it if it doesn't. So a system like Linux which consists of a few big parts &mdash kernel, shell, X-server, window manager and background services — is more user-friendly than one like Windows which consists of many small programs with obscure names interacting in ways that are a commercial secret.
Let me give you an example. Most Windows users have had the experience of being asked by their firewall whether program xyz.exe is allowed to access the Internet and finding that they haven't the faintest idea what xyz.exe is. Is it a nasty worm that they have picked up? Is it an intrinsic part of Windows? If it is, does it need to access the Internet in order for some other part of Windows to function correctly? And guess what! There's no documentation to tell them. So they let it go through because they're afraid of what might happen if they don't and then spend the rest of their session being afraid of what might happen because they did.
So I ask again: What exactly is "user-friendliness"?
Depends on who the user is- websurfer, musician, admin, programmer, secretary yadda yadda. As far as Unix users go, I think Linux is uber user friendly. I've used bunches of Unix based systems and Linux is definitely the most intuitive and easy to understand, which to me are two major components of user-friendliness.
Likwid
User friendliness sorts people into two groups. The keyboard master vs. The point and clicker. It just depends on who you feel like satisfying that day...
Dark_Stang