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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.
Mozilla put UI/UX people in charge of Firefox and destroyed the product. I'll take my "ugly" open source programs any day.
It's not a surprise that many of the larger open source projects lack professional UI/UX designers. These groups tend to become cliques where anyone who is not a programmer is seen as less than worthy. Who the hell wants to try to assist groups with attitudes like that? There are so many cases where professionalism is missing in the entire equation.
Many programmers need to wake up and understand that it's their own staunch idealism that is driving people who could greatly improve things away.
Maybe he should get his employer (Adobe) to get rid of that shitty sidebar that only disappears if you click the word Tools (despite no indication that's what's active) and which comes back every time you restart Acrobat Reader.
No to mention the billion-and-one things that can pop over the top of your PDF. Or the services, scheduled tasks, taskbar icons, startup entries, etc. that are recreated all the fucking time even when you disable them and tell it not to update. Or the horrendous options dialogs that hide all the options.
People who live in glass houses...
One of the largest contributing factors is the lack of professional designers contributing to open source projects
How about that, he wants someone to pay him to fuck up other people's projects and wants to browbeat those people into letting him fuck up their projects by saying they need professional design.
"open source is ugly, let's change things" is what turned Gnome 2, the best desktop environment of its day, into Gnome 3, which no one who has a choice uses.
"professional designers" can go to hell.
I edit code using emacs. It would make any "UX designer" throw up. To the clueless, it's "user experience" looks horrifically bad, especially how I have mine configured up old-school without menus or GUI buttons. Just text and a mode line.
But you know what? I can utterly, totally, annihilate people using better "UX quality" text editors when it comes to heavy duty text editing. I've had people literally gasp out loud watching what can be done.
I'll make a similar claim for other SW I've used, such as CAD systems, which are all but incomprehensible for novices but let experts work magic.
People mistake "ease of newbies being able to do something" with "expert usability". These are not the same. Most of the time, UX designers optimize for the first thing at the expense of the second. It's one thing if you can manage to get both, and I'm not saying that's impossible or that it never happens. But most of the time when UX experts get their hands on something, actual usability for experts is sacrificed on the alter of hand-holding for novices.
That's even becoming true of desktops now. Configurability is the enemy: it's too confusing, and we must not have anything which might require thought, no matter how useful it is. Computing is trending towards playskool-levels of being dumbed down.
Many people complain about the GIMP, but I started there and then had to learn Photoshop. The only reason people complain about GIMP is that they learned to use Photoshop first.
Then again, Apple, who used to be king of very functional design has thrown that all away in the search for "clean" appearance... whether or not it is consistent or usable and Google (Android) seems determined to follow.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
...will ironically continue to wonder why the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" hasn't happened while simultaneously misunderstanding and dismissing UI/UX.
It's nice to see slashdot hasn't lost it's ability to shoot the messenger. Instead addressing his comments, which are pretty much right on, everyone takes the opportunity to point out the designs they feel are worst ever.
Fact is, Open Source will remain counter culture until it has full teams to meet the designs that the public wants, instead of designing to geeks desires.
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The premise looks at the worst of the open source software projects and compares it to the best of the proprietary software projects. That's typically how these types of comparisons are done, with a huge anti-open source bias.
If you ask the wrong questions, you're going to get the wrong answers.
In my experience, when a UI expert says you need to fix your interface, he is almost certainly right.
When a "UX" "guru" says you need to "update" your "experience", he is almost certainly wrong.
A good UI is hard and takes *a lot* of time. I don't think the problem is a lack of designers but a lack of designers who can really put in the *time* with developers to actually polish things.
Sure, you can get things working to 90% but that last 10% that actually makes something quick and easy to use if HARD. Most open source projects just don't have enough people with enough time to devote to that last 10%.
The "open source is ugly" premise is sometimes right but for the reason that we're used to closed source software companies actually having enough staff and devoting enough time to that last 10% ... some of the time ;)
Open Source is ugly when they copy Apple and Microsoft. Almost all of the big projects do it, and claim it as some kind of central feature or revelation in design.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
UI is really no different to programming itself. A few people are really good at it. Many more people doing it are OK, but won't produce great results without some degree of leadership or guidance from the first group. There's a long tail of people who do more harm than good, and unless you can somehow get them up to the standards of at least the middle group, you're better off without them contributing at all.
Also like programming, it's quite difficult to know someone really good from someone just OK unless you're already pretty good yourself. Otherwise you lack enough of a frame of reference to make informed decisions or, often, to collaborate effectively with someone from a different field.
One thing that is a big difference is that at least there is some degree of objectivity with programming, in that up to a point everyone can see whether a program actually does its job when you run it, regardless of how it looks internally. With UI, there is much less hard data about general principles for what works well and what doesn't, and it usually requires significant effort and resources to collect hard data about the UI effectiveness in some specific area of a program under development.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In the end, the actual problem is that the people doing most UI/UX design these days are Millennials (aka Hipsters).
An integral part of these people's identity is that they're always right about everything, even when they're absolutely 100% wrong.
They've been raised by Baby Boomers (who we long thought to be the worst generation; Millennials have proven otherwise) to have a total inability to handle criticism. Legitimate criticism is typically mislabeled as "bullying" by Millennials. Perversely, because "bullying" is now allegedly involved, this allows Millennials to treat the wrongly-labeled "bully" far worse than the mislabeled "bully" ever treated anyone else!
This is why it's not unusual to see Millennials ban people from online discussion, for example. Millennials tend to be petty tyrants, hypocritically claiming to support freedom and justice, while simultaneously showing extreme contempt for both by engaging in censorship.
When you combine Millennials and their rotten philosophy with something like software UI design, the result is a complete disaster. Millennials automatically assume that their awful work is correct, even when users very plainly explain what the problems are. Millennials, being sure that they're correct, either deny or ignore the very valid complaints that users bring up. In the end the users typically move to an alternative piece of software, if one is available.
Now before you start with the "get off my lawn" crap, this isn't about age. If whatever generation comes after the Millennials can undo all of the damage that the Millennials have done, then I welcome their effort!
The whole 'UX' campaign is what destroyed usability in today's software. It traded graduated learning and functionality with fisher price level capabilities. Large fonts, wasted whitespace, and condescending status messages (think google, facebook, or the 'new' microsoft) rule the day. Search boxes are tacked on after the fact to make up for the useless interface. Of course, when one of these users wants to do more or have a problem fixed, it's technical people who have to get around the total lack of flexibility and technical feedback to fix the problem.
Lack of 'professional' designers is not the issue. There are plenty of paid designers turning out crap designs, too.
The argument made about developers vs users is also bullshit. In earlier times, the applications were developed by developers for use by ANYONE who wanted to do whatever it was the application was designed for. This forced anyone who wanted to do these things to learn how the application works. If it was designed well, the result was an educated, productive user who understands at least some of the underpinnings of the required workflow. Today's 'designing' assumes the user is an idiot and actively prevents any real mastery of the process. This results in garbage output.
VLC has a good design? Did they even look at the options panel? It has to be one of the worst. My favorites are the textboxes that give no clue as to the datatype or format expected. Firefox hasn't had a good interface since they wiped out the menu system. The fact that classic theme restorer is one of the more popular addons for the program speaks volumes about 'UX'.
Naturally, the guy being interviewed pointed out mostly pointless web 'apps', each with typical hipster names that have no relevance to their actual functionality. About what I'd expect from 'UX designers.'
Considering that the majority of Linux contributors are openly hostile to User Interface and Application "Look and Feel" considerations, and there is a general apathy to writing documentation to the "Hand Holding" level the average consumer demands, you only need to think about it for a moment to grasp the answer to "Is Linux ready for the Desktop" question.
It isn't, and never will be; a Geek has to be there somehow or Grandma isn't buying, regardless of how useful it would be to her.
From TFA: .... developers should look to improve their own design skills"
"What should developers who can't attract designers do? They shouldn't wait around. If they can hire a designer, great, but
As a dev, I want every possible option and every possible option to be exposed to the user, 'cause that's how I think as I'm programming.
As a designer, I know better-- a good interface HIDES options and choices from a user (and the less technical your expected audience, the more should be hidden) until necessary.
There's been many times where I've found that design choices can eliminate many programming problems and bottlenecks.
The problem is that open source developer tools are suited for source code over all other aspects of projects. This isn't just a problem with UX/UI design, it is also a problem with technical writing for documentation, marketing, user interaction, the whole nine yards.
Right now, please, tell me the best way to submit a conceptual UI design for an application into a git repository? Do you just create a PSD file and submit it? Then when someone else edits the PSD, how do you diff it? How do you easily track revision changes of visual assets?
In the closed source world, we have asset management systems that work in parallel with our source code management systems. But this is something that isn't common within the open source world. On top of this, great design is quite possibly much harder than great code. With code, it is easy to run new changes against unit tests to ensure that things do not break. But with layout changes, small or overhauls, how do you test them? They are subject highly to opinion more so than pure fact.
On top of this, take the general nature of open source projects in general. There are often many hoops to jump through to even push a fix for a confirmed bug after discovering it. Just one example (but this has been par for the course all along), I discovered a simple but critical bug in the MariaDB database server returning incorrect results on a SELECT statement. The test case was extremely simple and verified within an hour or two of the bug report being submitted. A couple weeks went by, no work happened on it. I decided to pull down the MariaDB code, hunt down the bug, fix it, and push the change to their git repo. The entire change was only modifying a single if statement condition. The approval process missed several releases of their software and took months, and countless chats in their IRC channel as well. If this is what it takes to get a single simple bug fixed, just imagine what someone would have to do for a serious change like UI cleanup and overhaul of a major application?
On top of that, just read the comments throughout here on Slashdot on this article. The main opinion is that UX/UI design is just "change for the sake of change" - which is apparently inherently bad. But take a step back and think about this: We're about to hit the year 2016. When are we finally going to have "The year of Linux on the Desktop?" We've been trying to push that concept for over a decade. But what is preventing it? Absolutely horrible UX/UI design, that is it. Linux itself may have almost every feature of Windows/OSX, but the elegance of being able to access and use those features is absolutely horrible from someone that doesn't already know Linux. Now look at Android, Google took Linux and re-imagined the UI from scratch, and now it is widely used and successful. It is intuitive and easy for novice users. They don't even need to know it is Linux at the core, it shouldn't matter. The interface is sleek, clean, and simple (save for some bastardizations that some of the handset makers and carriers screw up)
If you want the ultimate test of good vs bad UX/UI design, it is actually quite simple: have people sit down that have absolutely no idea how your program functions. They've never seen it or used it before. And have them attempt to use it with zero supervision. Watch how far they can get. See what all they can do. Look for trends and patterns in their usage. Find where people are getting frustrated, and try to make it simpler. This is what Microsoft did back in the '90s to create the start menu and start button. Check out the history of Windows Chicago: http://oyvind.servehttp.com/wi...
Designer: We've designed a new hammer. We've moved beyond the traditional "head and handle" paradigm. Meet: EggHammer. A simple egg-shaped piece of iron that you hold in your hand with a small flat area on one end. No handle. No join to wear out. Simple. Elegant. The egg shape fits in the palm. The flat end hits the nail. Best of all, you can put it on the shelf and it will stand there as an objet d'art resting on the flat surface. $199.00.
Carpenter: Dafuq? All the force from pounding goes right into my wrist like this. It's like pounding nails with a rock. What the hell are you babbling about? When I'm done with my hammers I hang them on nails I pounded into this board... with a hammer that doesn't suck rocks, which is what you're trying to sell me for TEN TIMES THE PRICE OF A REGULAR HAMMER.
Designer: you don't understand design.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If you're building a UI without knowing your audience, it's almost impossible to do a good job. Building substantial, customised UIs has been a large part of my work in recent years. I think much of the value I bring to these projects is that I make a big effort to get inside the heads of real world users, see things from their perspective, and give them the UI they need to get things done. That means knowing the target audience, ideally through things like direct conversations with users and solid data about how the systems are being used. Some of the most important code I write is the code that converts between a simple presentation and interaction design that fits the user's mental model and the sometimes horribly complicated internal model used by whatever system they're talking to.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.