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.

Comments

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A lot of "new UI/UX people" seem to be following wherever a tiny number of people from very famous tech firms lead. Unfortunately, this remains true despite those tech firms themselves producing some of the most horrible user experiences I can recall in a multi-decade career recently, often as a direct result of following the same path themselves.

For example, on a lot of web or graphic design forums, if you even try suggesting that flat design is almost always a bad idea that is built on poorly chosen basic design principles, you have a pretty good chance of being downvoted/modded/censored into oblivion. This remains true even if you try to present a neutral, objective case based on specific examples of poor usability, never mind trying to engage in wider debate about artificially limited tools leading to over-emphasis of icons (even though icons are frequently a bad choice for almost anything), over-emphasis of animations (even though animations often do more harm than good), trendy large and lightweight fonts harming readability, lack of brand differentiation because of the near-uniform appearance of everything, and so on.

And don't even think about going beyond generic flat design to criticising Apple's recent design efforts or Google's Material Design, because you might as well just hand in your geek card on the spot.