1. I've had issues with projects with terrible, bad, or just incredibly unintuitive UI design
2. I've recently tried to start a project on SourceForge, and found that I cannot seem to add another user to my project.
Why are these things frustrating for me?
- Well, I use software, and when I can't find something I need on a website, in a program, or on my OS, I lose productivity and/or sanity (depending on the problem).
- I also test software, as some of you may have figured out from the title (I pride myself on my subtlety), and a bad UI design not only sometimes makes it difficult to test (some non-standard GUIs are more difficult to automate than others), but I also consider these to be Usability bugs.
(As an aside here for those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is the wikipedia article on usability)
I consider usability to be one of the most important aspects of a program, right after and sometimes neck and neck with functionality, and attempt to push for these bugs to be fixed quickly.
The reason for this is fairly simple to demonstrate.
Think about the last time you went to a new website, or tried out a new program (alternatively, go to a new site right now, I'm sure you can find one soon. I'll wait. Back? Good.)
Was there one thing you wanted to do in your program, or one piece of information you wanted to learn from the site, that you just could not figure out? How long did you keep trying with that site or program? 2 seconds? 10 minutes? After a while, you give up.
And that means that the software failed. Whether it has the most miraculous features, the fastest, most efficient algorithms, it means nothing if your users can't find them, or can't figure out how to use them.
So, what was the last feature you tried to use that you just couldn't find/use?
