Someone's finally done it. They've gone and shouted to the high heavens "open source software's great, but darn if it isn't all so hard to use."

"Bring us a set of standards," bellow the developers, "and we will follow them."

And lo, standards were discussed.

I *think* this is a great idea. There are a lot of people out there contributing a lot of great work to open source software. But there seems to be a paucity of well-defined user interface standards, and the downright absence of user experience standards.

Here's where I think the stumbling blocks are (not that I necessarily think that they'll be impasses, but they're worth watching out for).

1) UI "standards" are often specific to an environment, and sometimes hard to generalize. "Use the corners of the screen to anchor important elements" is a generally good idea, and backed up by about 3 decades of user research. But it really applies mostly to desktop applications, it's problematic for web-based applications, and it may be nearly-nonsensible for PDA-based applications (which users interact with using a stylus or, if they're like me, their fingertip.)

2) OSS applications often have well defined sets of requirements, but user experience requirements aren't always thought of as being necessary. It's tough enough getting programmers to stop and consider a question like "How should the 'submit' button work?" They're not always apt (or even willing) to think about questions like "is the color scheme and layout conducive to visual scanning?" Yes, that's what UX people are for.

3) Non-OSS applications (by which I mean, those paid for and kept proprietary by a specific entity, which may or may not have a specific profit-motive) are often driven by customer needs. More and more, in my experience, a "customer experience" person is involved with (if not leading) the development efforts. I don't know to what extent this is the case in OSS.

There are other things to watch out for, like the quickly-exploding scope of what "UI" and "User experience" means. To many people it means "what the end-user sees". To me (and many of the people I work with) it includes many things the user does not see, like the information architecture, the database structure, and the backend transaction-processing systems. Are OSS programmers willing to share this area with Usability professionals? Are there turf issues that should be considered?