Inkscape
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Rhythmbox
Clementine
Virtualbox
Evince
Thunderbird

Look at the software center`s ratings for more 😉

Personally, I’m a VI person though;) In fact, I find myself ‘of a previous generation’ when it comes to what sort of UIs I favor. It is important to try account for this effect when evaluating what is a good UI vs a poor UI.

It seems a lot of the larger good programs are really only good because they mimic a fairly familiar interface. OpenOffice and Gimp pop to mind.

The Ubuntu installer (and perhaps other distros which I haven’t tried recently) would go on my list of good UI, mainly because most everyone else does it wrong IMO.

Chromium is pretty great IMO. Simple yet it offers more power and introspection than other big browsers. Firefox requires plugins to match it.

…
“Simple for simple stuff” really is a key. I think that statement is actually from some code library’s documentation.

Another key is the ability to fairly easily see what option/features/powers are available.

IMO, Ubuntu’s Unity is missing this by default due to it’s lack of a traditional menu.

Yes, it is important to hide them to some degree to avoid overload confusion, but they have to be visible without digging too deeply so that you know they are there (and UI designers should never rely on RTFM with respect to users figuring out *what* a program can do… RTFM is ok, to a degree, for *how* to do rare or complex things). Doesn’t everyone click on the “Advanced” tab at least once to see what’s there;)

Overall, the open-source community has a problem with UI standards (as in rules). IMO, this is largely a function of how annoying it is to write code for a GUI, and programming tools like GLADE could be a powerful way to encourage standardization if an effort was put into that.

BTW: Apple is downright draconian about GUI standards, perhaps too much since fitting some tasks into their scheme ends up being unintuitive.

To put a finer point on it, my hypothesis is that MS Office in particular is market-design driven and not usability driven.

Of course, a good procedure might be to develop litmus tests for your subjects. Show every one Gnome 2.0 and Unity and divide them, thusly, into two fundementally different kinds of test subject. I’ll bet the latter like the new MS Office and the former like Libra Office.

There is also a potential tradeoff between function and usability. I was trying to rotate some text in a spreadsheet I was developing for Apple’s Numbers the other day, could not figure out how. At first I attributed this to living in a different usability paradigm from Apple, but eventually found out that that basic function of all spreadsheets (i would say virtually indispensable) hadn’t been implemented yet in that software. Otherwise it’s very “usable” though.

At best, open source software has the same usability problems as closed source stuff. At worst, open source software has worse usability in general because most open source developers (myself included, BTW) tend to focus on the functionality and the features, and don’t give much though to the user interface – and many high-profile commercial programs go through a formal usability process as part of the product development lifecycle.

Usability is different from “Accessibility,” which supports users who have particular disabilities. Visual accessibility would support users who have limited vision or are blind.

I agree that gedit is a good example of usability. I wonder if it’s too simple of a program to make a good usability test case? I’m not sure on that one. (I certainly wouldn’t include something so trivial as the Notepad in Windows, but gedit does way more than Notepad yet seems easy to use.)