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Improving UI and UX: Changing the "Open Source Is Ugly" Perception (opensource.com)
jones_supa writes: For four years, Garth Braithwaite has been working at Adobe on open source projects as a design and code contributor. In addition to his work at the company, he also speaks at conferences about the power of design, improving designer-developer collaboration, and the benefits of open source. Still, he argues that the user experience is weak in many open source projects. One of the largest contributing factors is the lack of professional designers contributing to open source projects. Secondary to that, there are open source project owners who are unaware of the value of design or are unsure where to start with the design process. In an interview to Opensource.com, Braithwaite talks about the UX/UI topic, and gives some honorable mentions of projects that get it right.
I believe the problem with UI/UIX is more general than people realize. In short, it's the classic solution searching for a problem. For years and years, we've had loads of small improvements and innovations in UI implementations. It's really come a long way from the very first attempts at it (hello DOS and mainframe systems!), but it seems for the longest time the industry got stuck in the typical Mac OS-look. So in the late 90's, there was a surge of "cool" music players (WinAMP) and whatnot, that started to break from the old principles, with apparent success and "coolness" that others wanted to possess too.
The problem is, whoever tries to copy the true innovators, are often really bad at the game, so you get these really bad clones, and clones of those again. It's sort of a downward spiral where the herd is constantly trying to up their game, hoping for the same success as the true innovators had. In the meanwhile, these old innovators died, probably because, despite being good innovators, they were terrible at business!
This fad-driven development (FDD) has lead to horrible design-ideas over the years. Acolytes tend to swarm to these like flies on shit: hiding infrequently-used menu choices, unnecessarily increasing complexity, nagging popup notifications (ie. in taskbar), hiding the menu itself(!), adding sidebars with questions in Control Panel for "extra navigation" (MS Windows), limiting usability (everything Apple), forcing touch-interface onto suspecting desktop users (MS Windows), extra widgets, applets and whatnot in addition to the iconized desktop (MS Windows), forcing 3D requirements to a 2D experience (Unity), ...
Don't read me wrong: There's alot of good intentions and some good ideas in the UI/UIX-space that have far evolved since the early days, days where just displaying a window with a menu required arcane amounts of magic. For instance, W3C accessibility, universal and reactive design, and whatever they call it these days. Much of it are not really all new ideas, but it's compiled and packaged in a more understandable, copyable and standardized format, to more effectively distribute the core ideas.
The problem is, for true innovation to happen, there has to be total ownership and compensation for the innovators. When that doesn't happen, they merely become followers and copiers, which really doesn't bring that much innovation on the table. True innovation is also more risky, so you both pay more and risk more. In most cases, it makes sense for businesses to lean on the conservative side. Capitalism along with most human organisation, sadly enough, rewards the averages more consistently in the longer run, and need to heed both business and politics as well.
It all boils down to the basic requirements problem: What is the problem you want solved?
There's just never one final answer to that question.
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Professional UI/UX designers do exist. We are ergonomists, and human factors people, with actual basis in science—and some of us used to work on open source projects. We don't anymore for other reasons other than we don't exist.