Comment by Jedd 2 days ago
> but are awful at UX
This is such a weird trope.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
> This is such a weird trope.
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
Instructions unclear. I've kidnapped the GIMP and Inkscape teams and forced them to blend their work into one product.
It now has an ellipse tool, but finding it among the toolbars and menus is left as an exercise for the reader
Depends on your system. A few years ago I ran it on a MacBook where scrolling on an empty page took ages. Seems nobody tried it out on a Mac before releasing the port since it was totally unusable. Hopefully it's fixed now, but I wouldn't recommend a piece of software I don't trust to anyone.
Last time I tried (admittedly two years ago), it was incredibly sluggish, several times more so than MS Office, which is also sluggish in general.
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users
https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source...
Product & framework thinkers: Case studies.
https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...
I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this?
The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.
>As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.
> microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce
Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.
For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.
Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
I think you misread and assumed this was a comparison to something else. It’s not.
Actually, I like Microsoft Teams.
I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.
Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.
Teams are decent, wdym?
Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
> handles navigation poorly
My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it.
Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week
Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.
>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user.
Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person".
The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.
Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)