There’s a quote along the lines of “User error is not a thing, the system allowed for the error through bad design”
Which can be true depending on how far you stretch it. I’d say that if a chunk of the user base is having a problem, it’s a design problem
But IMO that’s one reason weird UX/design is not uncommon and can persist in dev ecosystems. The intended users are more proficient than average and most are able to work around most issues.
You can’t “skill issue” yourself out from every situation
If you can’t do that - that’s a skill issue tbh.
I was about to post this and just thought I should check if someone else had got to it first.
And here I am trying to convince my sales team that supporting a workflow where users run our app with
sudois a bad idea.cough Inkscape cough …
Why are y’all looking at me like that?
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There’s no cad somewhere on this planet with good UX.
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Counter point: KiCAD
Yes I know it’s schematic capture and PCB layout, but I’m giving it as an example for two reasons:
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The UX is genuinely really good and easy to use even for a novice following YouTube tutorials because it follows the norms of a schematic/PCB software package you’d expect to pay for (OrCAD, Altium, etc.)
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It’s open source and used in industry so GIMP and Inkscape have ZERO excuses for their horrific UX which is the prime reason industry professionals don’t want to spend an age re-learning all of their workflows.
There I said it, I’ll get down off this soapbox now.
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FreeCAD has improved a lot though with the 1.0 update.
Inkscape’s UX is horrendous. Looks alright, but it’s unusable garbage.
I thought it was just me! I’ve been using Inkscape for a long time now and I always feel I’m wrestling with the damn thing. I understand the principles behind vectors but I’ll be damned if I can consistently achieve what I’m attempting to accomplish.
Not sure if Inkscape works the same, but this game helped me when I was struggling with drawing curves in Adobe Illustrator.
I like GTK and it’s really simple to make good looking functional UI with GTK4, but apparently people have a hate boner for anything good looking, GTK or Gnome related
From what I’ve heard about it, it’s because the default gtk style only fits in with gnome, and gtk4 made it really difficult to customise it and is also really buggy on anything not gnome.
That’s what I’ve heard anyway, I’m not a distro dev and the distro I last used is still on gtk3
Nowadays “buggy” is not how I’d describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.
However it’s still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it’s inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK “design” choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!
Thank you!!!
I’m so glad someone else hates when applications hardcode the file picker, especially to the GTK one. I always have to remember it’s single click to open…
From what I’ve heard from devs who touched GTK/Gnome, that iskind of caused by the GTK devs.
GTK is the better looking girl at the sock hop. QT’s dress is a little ratty and she’s still got that lazy eye.
QT has a certain “Ah that’s good enough for now, I’ll fix it later” feel to it, while GTK makes things that look done. It’s such a shame they wasted all that potential making something as rectal puke as Gnome out of it.
Gnome is good, their extension system is ass but I love the rest of Gnome
This sadly excludes the majority of bad UX decisions that are done entirely to maximize users time inside of the app as well as display advertising.
So many functional apps are destroyed by these incentives. There is literally a “skill issue” but in the opposite direction. The design is either purposely malicious in a subtle way with “dark patterns” (something Amazon is insanely guilty of. Literally just go try and return and item.) or is purposely annoying trying to ensure the user purchases the “free trial” to actually make the app functional. Knowing a lot of users will be charged at least once for the free trial.
I guess my point is that there is so so so so much wrong with UX design today. But for the majority of people that’s not because of a bad programmer with no design knowledge. It’s on purpose in most cases.
But it is a skill issue, just UI/UX design skill. Not software development skill.
Well, yes, just not on the users side.
people always mention blender when talking about good ux in open source software, but i feel like the godot game engine doesn’t get enough love. it’s miles above of unity in terms of intuitiveness for me personally. plus it’s entirely customisable since it’s built in godot itself.
Remember when selecting something was done with the right mouse button in blender. That was great UX for beginners.
Godot is something I can still be super newb at and yet straight up admire. The nodes tree / scene system is a work of genius and I love it so much.
I do feel like a lot of inspector bits suffer from unintuitive “hard to distinguish menu to sub-sub-sub-sub menu” UX, but I think the editor’s “expand all inspector headings” (or something) option is really handy for knowing what you’re working with, and mitigates that a little.
Every Microsoft product.
But also Gimp.
Engineers don’t let engineers design interfaces.
Linux desktop zealots summed up in one meme. Perfection.
smh skill issue
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I don’t think this is right. It’s more like:
This software is so obscenely powerful that UX is irrelevant. If you want that power, you are going to learn how to use it. We’re too busy making the software powerful to waste time making it accessible to people who can’t be bothered expending the effort.
This is especially relevant in open-source. It’s free software bro. Pick two ONLY: Free, Easy, Powerful
Counterpoint: Blender, once they stopped trying to dismiss critique of its formerly godawful UX as a “skill issue”. I even saw Blender users looking into alternatives the moment Blender wasn’t awful to use, because they no longer could be special little snowflakes for using a piece of software, as “normies” started to “invade” their community.
blender is obviously an exception, they have the resources to do it. the vast majority of projects this post is about do not.
if people want to feel special for using difficult software, that’s dumb, but that’s not why the software is difficult.
“the exception proves the rule” and so on
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UX only people who are willing to read the manual understand*
i learned pretty much everything about the vast majority of tools i use on a daily basis literally just by reading the manual. i know that attention span, and well, literacy are both high bars but if I can do it you can too.
It’s entirely possible to know how to use a program and still think its UI is dogshit.
If it’s a terminal application, the UI is essentially the same for every program. and it’s a UI i’m comfortable with and enjoy using. GUI apps though, I honestly hate 90% of the time. Almost every graphical application is utter dogshit. So we agree… kinda?
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I really dislike this sentiment in this context. This sentiment is about applications made for people who barely use computers. It’s for like… iPhone apps to order food. This sentiment is just incorrect when it comes to technical tools made for professionals.
Apply this to like any other profession and it makes it obvious how nonsense it is.
If you need a manual to disassemble this engine, it’s a terrible engine.
If you need a manual to pilot this helicopter, it’s a terrible helicopter.
If you need a manual to operate this electron microscope, it’s a terrible electron microscope.
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I see where you’re coming from, but I’ve encountered many things in professional applications where the UX baffles me. I know what I’m trying to get the program to do but it seems to require me to keep notes as to how to achieve the thing. Menu entries with needlessly cryptic names, heavily nested functionality, that sort of thing.
While I believe everything I’ve said I also believe that 90% of graphical applications are dogshit and 99% of closed source software is dogshit and I don’t think these things can change due to conflict of interest. I very strictly use only open source software in my workflow and because of this, when I have a problem with the tools I just fix them myself.
Even if I had that luxury, I really don’t want to spend my time fixing someone else’s UI. I have my own projects to work on.
I used to do a lot of user testing and I think it’s something every bit of software needs. I really admire projects that decide to do big pushes on usability and papercuts.
