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Ask Slashdot: Should Open-Source Developer Teams Hire Professional UI/UX Designers?
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: There are many fantastic open-source tools out there for everything from scanning documents to making interactive music to creating 3D assets for games. Many of these tools have an Achilles heel though -- while the code quality is great and the tool is fully functional, the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are typically significantly inferior to what you get in competing commercial tools. In an nutshell, with open source, the code is great, the tool is free, there is no DRM/activation/telemetry bullshit involved in using the tool, but you very often get a weak UI/UX with the tool that -- unfortunately -- ultimately makes the tool far less of a joy to use daily than should be the case. A prime example would be the FOSS 3D tool Blender, which is great technically, but ultimately flops on its face because of a poorly designed UI that is a decade behind commercial 3D software. So here is the question: should open-source developer teams for larger FOSS projects include a professional UI/UX designer who does the UI for the project? There are many FOSS tools that would greatly benefit from a UI re-designed by a professional UI/UX designer.
I'm making this one simple for you. Yes, if you've got the money, hire them. Make sure they agree to the plan to open source their part of the work too, and ahead of time, or at least give you full rights to it so you can if you choose to.
Maybe the question should be: why aren't UI/UX designers donating time like developers are?
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Why don't competent UI/UX designers feel compelled to contribute to open-source projects?
Is it because UI/UX designers are universally a bunch of assholes? (unlikely)
Is it because UI/UX naturally evolves as a secondary concern to software development? (possibly)
Is it because the types that initiate/maintain open-source projects generally consider UI/UX to be of lesser importance? (now we're getting somewhere)
Thats probably why (as a general rule) server side open-source projects are more successful.
Or is maybe the problem that OSS developers often just don't recognize that they're no good at UI/UX design?
It's less that they don't know they're bad at it (some of that is happening too) and more that they just don't care about how learning curves affect software adoption. They're typically creating a solution to a problem they understand very well and simply haven't budgeted time to even think about how to approach it from the mindset of someone who does not.
I "know* that I suck at UI/UX. I've been programming for 20 years, and actively studying programming the whole time, so I can generally add a feature or option I want very quickly - sometimes in a matter of minutes. The UI for the new option will be another checkbox or whatever. I'm not improving the UI overall, and hopefully not making it significantly worse.
So I spent 30 minutes and got the feature, fix, or option that I need. I suck at UI, but I don't suck badly enough that I then hire a *competent* professional to make the one part of the UX better for me. It does what I need it to do, the value prop isn't there for me to spend $10,000 getting the UI improved.
There is something else going on. My last job was working full time on an open source project. I sent most of my work upstream. Our organization also had some graphics arts and UI types that made it look pretty after I was done. To my knowledge, it never occurred to them to contribute their work back to the project. Contributing to open source just isn't something they think about. Programmers know about open source. In college and early in our careers we're told that contributing to open source can be a resume builder. Are UI folks told that? Is there an awareness of open source?
You could have just said you don't know what ux designers do.
Why would he have to? UX designers themselves don't know what they do.
But look at the amount of terrible UX in closed source software. I don't think there are many people who will praise the direction that Microsoft took with the more recent installments of Windows. Some UX designer was responsible for that. Hell, there are people who still hate the ribbon with a passion and that's a decade gone at this point. It almost seems more like tossing darts in terms of successes, and a lot of good UIs are merely refinements on something created ages ago.
UX is almost more like a religion than a science. There are some core tenants that everyone generally agrees on, but you can interpret the scripture almost any way you like to support whatever crazy ideas you have as long as you get get some followers on board.
The UX in open source is largely bad because no one tried or wanted to spend any time on it. The UX in closed-source software is generally good when someone ripped off the one good example discovered years ago or just as terrible as the open source software despite huge amounts of man hours and other cost thrown at the problem. I suspect that the good UX comes from the developers who are users themselves and have a good understanding of the software and the needs of the users. The people who generally do UX for commercial software are so divorced from the users and the product that they end up creating some heinous monstrosity in their pursuit of artistry.
It isn't hard for the programmers who write this stuff to eat their own dogfood (use their own software just once) and notice how fucking obtuse, buggy and clunky the UI is. Gnome's System Monitor, which so many Linux desktop distros use as their process monitor, is god-awful, even with so many eyes on it every day. It doesn't take a UX designer to fix it, it just takes a programmer who is familiar enough with the source code.
Another example: Gnome Maps has bugs all over the UI (not bugs at lower layers, because it doesn't crash) but you can left click / right click / menu selection your way into trouble very quickly and easily.
People who write open source software are doing so out of their free time, and I bet they get to a certain point where the functionality is all there, and they get bored with testing and bugfixing the useability aspects.
Writing a good UI is more about really caring than design problems. It takes a lot of time that nobody is paying for and it's not fun. That is why the UX with open source is mediocre. Any programmer can look at a commercial product's UI and try to get parity with what they're writing, but they don't, and that's perfectly understandable.
So in conclusion, I'd say in my professional opinion, that we just need a company with deep pockets to sponsor extant open source programmers to put the finishing touches on their work. It's something they're far better suited to get done than a UX designer.