I went out for a walk with my girlfriend today taking the GPS along. She ended up stealing it and obsessively mapped every footpath we walked on.

So far so good, but once we got home showing her how to post-process the data wasn't as easy.

She downloaded the experimental Windows installer for JOSM which doesn't default to Mercator for some reason, and Yahoo WMS doesn't work either for some reason, with no way to find out why.

Once she was running JOSM she had trouble with its interface, mainly the stickyness of it. She'd create a way neglecting to double click to explicitly end it. Or once the way was created she couldn't select it because you have to switch modes in JOSM (add -> select) to be able to do that.

Of about 3 hours with JOSM probably 1/3 of that was spent fighting the interface. I had very similar problems with my first 12 hours or so of JOSM myself. It's easy for me to edit with it now but getting good at it takes a long time.

"I would never have been able to find out how to use that program if you weren't helping me, it's completely unusable by default".

The only reason *I* know how to use JOSM was that I spent 2-4 hours of those first 12 hours reading online manual and experimenting with it.

Maybe we're just idiots, or maybe JOSM isn't very newbie friendly.

Then I thought I'd show her how to use Potlatch, at first the website yelled at her and once we opened Potlatch it showed giant black holes all over the Yahoo layer:

She clicked around in it and apparently changed something because Potlatch said she had unsaved changes, but with no way to find out what she had changed exactly she ended up closing it out of fear of breaking something.

At least JOSM has a change history dialog.

So there you have it, anecdotal but hardly a unique experience. I wonder how many potential mappers are lost due to various miscellanious unfriendly (mis)features in the editors & website.