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Usability Eye for The GIMP Guy
TuringTest writes "The GIMP has recently signed up for
evaluation by OpenUsability.org. 'Many user interface decisions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design. In order to improve this, we need the help of experts. To find them, GIMP has joined
the OpenUsability project. Here's a platform where Open Source developers and usability experts get together.' They also report their first experiences with the paper prototyping of a new Import PDF dialog."
I have used GIMP many times and tried to do useful things with it. Overall the feature set is acceptable. But I will never be able to use it for actual work until they fix the big one.
PROVIDE AN OPTION FOR AN MDI GUI ALL IN ONE WINDOW.
With dockable tool palettes.
Every time I bring this up to anyone who knows gimp, they tell me to run it in its own virtual desktop. I don't use virtual desktops, and I don't want an app to have a ton of toolbars floating around anyway.
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I used to think the usability of the GIMP was bad, turns out it's just different from what i was used to. The more i used it exclusively, the more i figured out how nice it was.
Nowadays, if i go back to a windows system with photoshop or paintshop pro, it feels really cluttered and i get 'clausterphobic'.
Of course, i'm speaking as a casual user who does pretty basic operations. Maybe it's different if you work with it professionally?
1 - You want a GUI which looks like Photoshop? Get Gimpshop and stop whining! 2- Now, what about comparing GimpShop to Photoshop?
By excellency, in OSS, the Inmates are running the Asylum. Usability is by far the biggest problem OSS software has right now. Not security, since security does not matter that much. Yeah, it does not matter. Microsoft gets away with the biggest security stunts in history of modem society, but this only because their products are a lot more USABLE by the end user. And the user will obey and put up with the mistreating, just to be able to use the darn COMPUTER.
... Learn how to develop USABLE stuff, not USEFUL stuff, since there are hundreds of applications for almost every darn task out there.
Gimp is the epitome of wrong UI in OSS, I can barely use it without online howtos, and I'm experienced. Now, imagine Av. Joe
You, sir, do not understand usability. Usability is *not* having 10,000 options for the user to customize and play with. Usability, in the strictest sense, is having an interface such that a user can pick it up *without* having to dig through options.
Here's something else you're missing - the type of people Gnome is targeting *DO NOT CARE* about 95%+ of the settings that would require opening GConf to change. For these users, it's far better to have a tool layout such that finding basic options does not require digging through 4 layers of option dialogues.
I'm not saying Gnome is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, simply that the majority of people on Slashdot who complain about Gnome being 'ruined' just plain do not understand how difficult seemingly simple tasks are for the average user. I mean, really, I've been using Linux since around '99, and run KDE from time to time just to see how they're progressing, and it almost always ends up with me digging through the control panel searching for things that should be rather simple to change because KDE exposes too many options for the average user.
Sure, if you're a geek and enjoy playing with all your settings, more power to you. But for people who simply want to use their computer, the KDE Control Panel is a confusing mess. So I'd really take issue with the idea that KDE is improving at an "impressive rate." If they spent more time cleaning up the Control Panel and building in HAL tools instead of adding huge oversized tooltips and calling it a usability improvement, I might be able to agree.
The changes that have been made to Gnome (for the most part) were not mistakes. It was a deliberate decision to move toward an interface that's more usable to a computer neophyte. Argue that the KDE interface is 'familiar' all you want, but the idea behind usability is that you don't *need* to be familiar with it to figure out how to do what you want.
If the openusability thing actually makes changes which are demonstrably an improvement then I have no problem with it.
However, if all that happens is that they turn the interface into a clone of PhotoShop's then the developers will be doing the Gimp (and us) a disservice. Personally, I find the "classic" Gimp UI perfectly approachable (and I actually use it on a daily basis).
Incidentally, IIRC I heard (probably on /.) that there is some sort of extension or whatever that is supposed to emulate PS's UI already in existence, but a quick google just now failed to find it...
All of you bashing the GIMP should try to using Photoshop which will set you back about $500.
.au) to have a program thats been laid out with some regard to years of user feedback.
If you look carefully, I think you'll find that most of the comparisons are with Photoshop; in other words, they have tried it, and apparently it is worth $500 (or $1200 here in
Obviously there are these artistic types that went through years of conditioning who claim the contrary.
Again, considering the fact that Adobe have used user feedback to refine their product, is it a question of the "artistic types" being conditioned to Photoshop, or Photoshop being conditioned to the "artistic types"? If I was designing a graphic manipulation program the first people I'd ask about UI layout is graphic artists, and I'd take their comments seriously because they set the (de-facto) standard that everyone else follows.
And bearing in mind that graphic design is a specialized discipline with a technical language of its own, how intuitive do you expect a user interface to be for "hacker types"? Do you also expect to be able to use Blender without understanding coordinate geometry? Neither GIMP or Photoshop promises a novice complete usability from the start, that's the price of a comprehensive feature set. But the fact that anyone is still prepared to pay hundreds of dollars for one, when they can both do (almost) the same job according to the specifications should be a bit of a clue stick: apparently it is possible to make a UI suck so badly you can't give it away, regardless of the underlying features.
Frankly, I recommend GIMP to everyone I know who thinks they need a pirated copy of Photoshop. I've handed out over thirty copies for various platforms on CD; the only person who persisted for any length of time was my 71 year old father, and he gave up using it when he found Graphic Converter had a clone stamp tool. Think about it: "does everything you'd need from Photoshop, its free, has no license issues", yet not a single taker, even from those who have never used Photoshop. Care to explain that?
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