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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.
Boring is a real problem in open source. I don't find most open source applications compelling, because they generally don't move the flag forward, and instead just poorly mock existing commercial efforts. And usually they are quiet a bit less refined.
So being someone who likes to both have the best tools at the ready, and reward innovators, why would I use a a bad copy of something good... just because it is free? It is not enough. It is like a bad copy of an original painting. The validation in open source that coders get kudos amongst other coders, not users. So rarely does anybody actually care if it is usable at all. And so no mainstream users ever emerge. Until you change the personal validation proposition in the open source community (and maybe our social skills too), it is not going to change.