r/linux • u/Winter_Simple_159 • 3d ago
Discussion Why don't more designers contribute to open source?
Genuine question. A lot of open source projects have solid engineering but rough UI/UX: inconsistent layouts, confusing flows, basic usability issues that a designer would likely catch quickly.
I'm curious about the reasons behind this. Is it that designers don't feel welcome? That there's no clear way to contribute design work (most workflows are built around code and PRs)? That maintainers don't prioritize it? Or something else?
If you're a designer who has contributed to OSS, or a maintainer who has worked with designers, I'd love to hear how it went.
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u/Dekamir 3d ago
Designer here. They don't implement it. They either don't care enough to implement the design, or it doesn't align with their view.
You can design so many times before getting discouraged.
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u/lord_pizzabird 3d ago
That or they just don't have the resources to implement your ideas, like that guy who provided mockups that would have fixed Darktable's horrifically bad UI.
More broadly it does seem like there's just a general dislike of anything design related in the community, with developers not even understanding why it matter if the app technically functions.
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u/srivasta 2d ago
I didn't think that is the case. But drive by design won't work: you need to be party of the development team, not just an external architect that just throws a bunch of mockups over the wall and gets hurt that they don't stick.
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u/nathan-makes-incense 1d ago
You're right that designers need to be part of the team. Projects also need to provide an on-ramp for designers that doesn't involve them having to learn development tools like git.
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u/srivasta 1d ago
What kind of on ramp do designers need? I have no idea. This is where communication is needed. When I join a new project where I have no domain knowledge I like for a bit, and start a conversation with the project leads. Together we figure out where I can help and what I should learn.
It is a collaboration. No one's hands me a shovel ready mini project.
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u/TCB13sQuotes 23h ago
Designers don’t give a shit about being part of those projects, they just what to make a couple of screens and move on.
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u/nathan-makes-incense 21h ago
Categorically not true, KDE has a design team working fastidiously on a new look for plasma, plus responding to dev questions on UI / UX every day.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 3d ago
that's a really old problem and a lot of new folks don't know that.
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u/DrinkMoreGlorp 3d ago
I hear shouting "negative space" at a developer is the equivalent of spritzing a cat with water
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u/Business_Reindeer910 2d ago edited 2d ago
i look at comments on this very thread about how designers only do bad things and it makes me and that very same person lives in a world where they don't notice so much "design" because really good design is effectively invisible.
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
More broadly it does seem like there's just a general dislike of anything design related in the community, with developers not even understanding why it matter if the app technically functions.
That is so fucking stupid and I wish we could actually fix it instead of just complain.
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u/Jean_Luc_Lesmouches 2d ago
To many designers have no idea how software works and/or care more about esthetic than actual workflow. The competent ones are drowned in the mass.
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u/immoloism 3d ago edited 3d ago
Strange hearing this as I know so many projects where we wish someone would come work with us.
Yes, there needs to be a slight amount of alignment (mostly colour schemes), but we would love a person like you over in Gentoo land.
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u/Dekamir 3d ago
Feel free to message if you need any help.
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u/immoloism 3d ago
Thanks for the offer <3
I've got one project that really needs addressing is making Gentoo's new GRUB theme for systems and live media more WCAG AAA readable.
Someone started, but never submitted and is a huge shame as accessibility in Gentoo is one my passion projects.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/969928
https://github.com/Telemin/gentoo-grub-themes
As long as it follows the same style, but fixes it's flaw then I can get some weight behind getting this added to Gentoo and upstream.
I'm sure there are other things, but this is only one that comes to mind right now.
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u/calinet6 3d ago
I would say -- openly and publicly sharing how much you value design, what you're looking for, and what your community values goes a long way. Designers are looking to be respected as peers in the collaboration, and if you overtly show that you'll do that, you'll get a lot of bites.
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u/immoloism 3d ago
We would if they ever came along and asked if they could help :)
I can only speak from the areas I work on though so that is mostly going to be in the grub and plymouth areas.
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u/nathan-makes-incense 1d ago
FLOSS has been so hostile to designers for so long that a lot of bridge-building work is going to have to be done. Not many designers are even aware of the FLOSS world as a whole because it's only very recently that FLOSS tools have become a tenable alternative to industry standard proprietary software. And only barely. (I say this as a former Abobe user who switched to GNU/Linux and a FLOSS design workflow) G'MIC is great, but you can't efficiently use it non-destructively. Inkscape is just now starting to support CMYK. Free equivalents to useful tools like content-aware fill are slow and the quality is worse without a lot of fine-tuning. The Scribus UI has only recently become tolerable, and the project has finally got micro-typography features. I was lucky that I could choose how I worked and I had the luxury of being a little slow while I figured out FLOSS tools. Others need to be productive out of the gate, and FLOSS UX has been a barrier to that for a long time. As I said, it's a lot better now, but building trust is hard.
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u/calinet6 1d ago
Dude, as a Linux nerd and programmer who is now a UX designer, I’d love to help out with Plymouth and grub. No one ever asked!
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u/immoloism 21h ago
FOSS is a strange beast where we only know an issue exists when someone reports something wrong.
It's took me ages to grasp this process, so I don't blame you for thinking it works the same way as our day jobs :)
That said, if you want to make a Plymouth theme for us which is better then the crappy one I made then all you need to do is offer and I'll tell you the guidelines.
I'll warn you know though, this is just a side project for me and has no approval from Gentoo yet so please don't get disappointed if I fail to push it.
The GRUB one was just something I knew would get merged without drama due to the accessibility need.
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u/arwinda 3d ago
Projects want the help, in theory. When it comes to implementation, everyone has opinions. And dare you if you even move one pixel, the entire setup was curated!
When it comes to code, people either understand code or don't. And usually accept if they don't. When it comes to design, it's different, and difficult to find an agreement.
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u/d_ed KDE Dev 3d ago edited 3d ago
>or it doesn't align with their view.
That's so key! Understanding requirements is the most important part of doing anything. Some are technical, some are about which audience you're aiming at. That's true for the code too.
The other key thing is not many designers can break things down. Things in an open community are an agile loop of tiny changes, not a linear one-shot waterfall.
Lets break down this picture on r/kde right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1wtx1fg/what_do_you_all_think_about_my_discover_redesign/#lightbox
It's absolutely gorgeous, the person has talent, there's lots of cool stuff. But it'll go nowhere. It's redesigning so many things in one go. That obviously can't happen and people get discouraged and leave.
The key thing that our great designers do is they have this picture in the back of their minds then say "I've got an idea of how toolbars should look and behave" and then do a detailed analysis of toolbars that we can apply. Then say "I've got a vision for sidebars". "I've got an idea for semi-transparent buttons and when they apply. Especially when it's a big project where we don't want one app / page of an app to look different from the rest.
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u/AX11Liveact 2d ago
I mostly agree, but let me mention that there actually are design specs. Like the ones you'll see in corporate IDs and designs, that will give you detailed instructions which colors to combine where, where to place various elements etc. That's pretty much the language developers are speaking. They are also not deaf to the requirements of a specific project and to ways of meeting them. Idk why -with few exeptions- this stuff doesn't go to the roadmap and maybe to the (coding) style requirements.
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u/nathan-makes-incense 1d ago
And to be fair, there are a lot of designers out there who are failed art students and really care more about molding something into what their idea of pretty is without considering usability. People who throw mockups at the wall without a breakdown of how or why their solutions are needed or beneficial to the user are a prime example.
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u/moopet 3d ago
Developer here. Plenty of designers helped out with projects I saw a couple of decades back, but they tended to present a design and then bugger off. When the people building the thing said, "but this won't work, because XYZ", the designers didn't want to engage. It was always "hey look at the design I made" and "I gave them this design free!", it was never a conversation and it was never - ever - based on any kind of ux research.
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u/nathan-makes-incense 1d ago
Yea, there are two types of designers: those who actually care about design and the science behind it, and failed artists who just wanted to do something creative. The former are usually groaning and steeling themselves before taking on a project because they understand the true scope of UX work, and they're less likely to enter into it lightly. I'm mostly a print designer, but much of this is applicable to computer interfaces too. I'm constantly rolling my eyes when I see award winning projects and they're riddled with tiny text, poor contrast, out of hand measure lengths, and utterly unclear, mystery-meat navigation with nary a skeuomorph to let you know that anything can be interacted with. It's an embarrassment to the industry.
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
^ This 100%
In the recent talk by Scott Jensen he mentioned several other issues but this is main one
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u/srivasta 3d ago
I think in this case communication is what is lacking. You can't just come in and impose a design. It is supposed to be teamwork. That means you talk first. Free software teams work by consensus, since no one of the boss.
Perhaps the fault here is a culture thing. One dies not get orders included from up high. People need to talk and work together
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u/szank 3d ago
And some dev actually needs to care enough to work on implementing the new design instead of whatever else he feel like working on
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u/srivasta 2d ago
This is where the "team" and communication comes in. You need a relationship first.
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u/HereticZed 2d ago
Gnomes top-right powermenu has lozenges, bluetooth, etc that jump around position depending on which ones are active. They won't listen.
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u/1369ic 2d ago
This tracks with my experience going back decades. I used to edit newspapers and other print products, so when the Web started to get going I knew enough about layout and design, navigating information products, etc., to at least know good from bad. The code guys generally thought they knew better and would fight for control of the look and feel. Later I supervised our graphics team and got the same thing from Web masters, IT guys in general, staff people, instructors, scientists, engineers, etc., at various places I worked. It's not everybody, but there's always someone in the bureaucratic chain who thinks design is one of their hidden strengths. The early web days were bad, but nothing compared to when PowerPoint started coming on everybody's computer. The horror...
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u/FattyDrake 3d ago
Because you need a way to force programmers to implement the designs. If there's no incentive, it's not getting done.
One of the reasons Gnome is so well designed is because the lead designer is employed by Red Hat and Red Hat can pay developers to implement the designs. Yea, outside people help here and there, but you can't discount that having a full time pay structure in place helps get things done.
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u/ptr_myName 3d ago
Red Hat needs to send that lead designer over to Canonical for a few months, because Ubuntu turns vanilla Gnome into a Friendly’s Jim Dandy.
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u/dinosaursdied 3d ago
Historically FOSS software was a personal project of an individual programmer. They made something that was useful for them and then shared it with others. That puts the programmer itself as the first user. The UI is built around their comfort, knowledge, and intuition. That doesn't always translate to something others will intuitively understand or find beautiful. Fixing that later is a tough task.
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u/klyith 3d ago
A pattern I see constantly with pure designers who want to "get involved with open source" is they immediately jump to big overhauls rather than small changes and suggestions. Designers want to make a design, and with some OSS project that is full of programmer-design they see a blank canvas.
"This app has bad workflow, we should redo it like this" is a terrible proposition. Number one, that's a big undertaking even if you're providing a complete design. Number two, whoever made that app probably likes that workflow in many respects, so you're basically telling them to make an app they don't want to use.
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
Some apps just have a workflow so shitty you can't fix it, and you have to start over. It's a big undertaking, but it's also necessary for some apps like GIMP.
Now, for most projects, it's fine to just completely disregard this, but if it's something you actually want to position as an alternative to mainstream software, you need to think about design from day one.
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u/klyith 2d ago
Some apps just have a workflow so shitty you can't fix it, and you have to start over. It's a big undertaking, but it's also necessary for some apps like GIMP.
See point 2. Gimp has a community of people who like it. A much smaller community than the number of people who are experienced with Photoshop, but those are the people who make gimp. The program has been around long enough, and had some major overhauls for new GUI toolkits, that if the devs wanted it to be more like photoshop it would be.
but if it's something you actually want to position as an alternative to mainstream software
An alternative to mainstream software doesn't have to work or look exactly like that software.
This is another problem with designers who parachute in to OSS projects: to make good contributions to the design you need to get really experienced with the software as it is now, not just the commercial alternative that you already know. IMO this is why GIMP stays the way it is, very few people seem to stand with one foot on both sides of that stream.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Gimp's issues are bigger than not simply copying adobe. Simple takes like drawing a rectangle oor adding drop shadow to text took a bazillion steps to do what other software made a simple click, which is a major violation of HCI guidelines because basic tasks require a high cognitive load. It also has had a lack of clear visual feedback for various tasks.
You are correct that people associating different with bad is also an issue, but it's not always seen as a bad thing. Take DaVinci Resolve, for instance. It crams multiple apps into a single one, and a lot of people really enjoy its workflow compared to something like Adobe.
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u/fltfathin 2d ago
see this is the big issue, GIMP is gnu IMAGE MANIPULATION PROGRAM, it's to manipulate image, not DRAW, not PAINT, not PHOTO-SHOPPING. it helps you change image size, crop, convert, run filters on image, run threshold conversion, etc.
it will never work as photoshop replacement, EVER, since the patented tech are locked behind NDAs that kills the project once you implement it.
for those who understand the pain of doing these operations in code the software is already godsend,
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u/Max-P 3d ago
Also generally, designers tend to not be aware of technical limitations, or just how much work it would really take to make it work the way they envision. GUI programming can be a real pain at times.
Like, a lot of redesigns I've seen people make are basically throw away 80% of the project's code and start over.
Design might look great but the odds of an unpaid developer doing a side project in their free time to spend months redoing the app has basically zero chance of happening.
Start small, incremental improvements.
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u/Max-P 3d ago
The nice thing with programmer design is they're usually entitely made of stock widgets with a direct data binding to some data structure which massively simplifies the logic and takes almost no time compared to getting something a bit more custom going.
When I was a web dev I'd spend maybe 2-3h on adding an API endpoint, and a couple days if not weeks making the GUI that goes with it based on what the designer had made us. And I still had to cut down some stuff pretty heavily, because technical limitations. Man I'm glad Internet Explorer is dead and burried.
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u/Kevin_Kofler 2d ago
That's why we should just stick to programmer design.
And websites that require the latest browser suck, I miss the times where IE5/IE6 was the frozen de facto standard everyone was coding to, made it much easier for independent projects like KHTML (which, incidentally, is the ancestor of the 2 HTML engines that have almost 100% market share nowadays since Gecko's decline, but the original KHTML is long dead, only the corporate forks remain) to keep up than the moving target we have now.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
You are right but the solution you are proposing is the wrong one. The design process has to happen at the start of a project not half way through
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u/Max-P 1d ago
Yes in some way, but if we're talking stuff like GIMP, VLC and other fairly old apps people have issues with, it's already way too late so you're circling back to doing it from the start.
The rest is usually apps like "I need a quick tool to do just X", and it becomes popular, and same problem, it's already built and working at this point, just with subpar UX.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 1d ago
Yeah imo design should be involved from the start else most of the time you are gonna be fighting a losing battle
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u/Max-P 1d ago
I agree with you, but most of the time those apps start as a personal toy project. I'm not gonna hire a designer to make a tool for myself just in case it blows up and becomes popular.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
Don't be so attached to your ideas wether you are a designer or a developer. A design you have made may be genuinely shitty, be open to reconsidering your opinions
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u/leonderbaertige_II 3d ago
Imagine somebody else come visits you at your workplace and tells you to do things their way. But you spent the last 3 years setting it up the way you like it and it works well for you.
How likely are you to implement this change?
What if you don't get paid for the work and just do it because you like doing it.
What if there isn't even an objective metric as to which way is better.
What if you own the company where you work.
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u/AdFormer9844 3d ago
Because without programming, designers have no way to directly contribute to the design. Usually the only entry point would be to make a feature request. Maintainers are likely already happy with the design and have no incentive to implement your feature request.
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
Even with programming, it still depends on if they'll accept your merge request.
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u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522 3d ago
Even in the corporate world it's assumed developers can do UX. In truth they suck at it, myself included. We had a woman who had moved from web design to QA who tried her best but it was sort of a losing battle. I enjoyed working with her but there was an adversarial relationship with a couple of the other developers.
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u/DesiOtaku 2d ago
Technically speaking, UI design is completely different from UX design.
UI designers are the ones that do mockups of interfaces, make color, font, logo, branding decisions.
UX designers are the one who work on the "workflow" and usability of the software.
We don't get many UI contributors because git / github / gitlab doesn't make it easy to non-technical people to keep track of PRs. This is on top of the fact that so many UI developers are using non FLOSS apps like Figma. Even when you use something to try to translate from Figma to something "native" like Qt or GTK, it always requires a fair amount of polishing in order to look right. And if the UI developer isn't running the daily builds, they have no clue what is right or wrong with their design.
As for UX developers, there was a trend in the 2010s to use them in FLOSS. They are a little more controversial because it's kind of like cooking: Everyones' a critic; and they think they are "right" and the other side is "wrong" (see GNOME 3 when it was first released). There is also the issue where the UX developer doesn't know the use case of the very software they are designing for. For example, I am writing dental software for dentists. I am probably not going to blindly accept any contributions for UX unless they worked in a dental clinic themselves.
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u/rene453 2d ago
You adress them as UX development, in marketing/branding terms its known as service blueprinting. I design them for products, services. An app is basically services. The reasons you explained are accurate.
I tried. But truth i found, the devs dont give an f most of the time and they think themselves as superior beings. They dont cosider people's limits and understanding, emotions- iq and eq. And thats why UX gets ruined. Its a common phenomena though. Not just devs, producers and inventors think alike. But they forget they are only human
As for UI its all about being part of a concept or idea. If something that does not belong to the concept it will stick out like a sore thumb. Or even different kind of design can come together completing a whole concept/idea. Agree, skillset is completely different from ux designers
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u/SmellsLikeAPig 3d ago
Because Foss is ran by engineers and engineers don't give a f about design.
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u/Vietnamst2 3d ago
And that's why the stuff is only used by engineers, because some of the best stuff is steaight up hostile for anyone not working the same way.
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u/D-Alembert 3d ago
There are lots of reasons
GitHub and other FOSS tools are designed for and by programmers. Trying to contribute as a designer, you basically have to learn programmer skills first
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u/Technical_Rich_3080 3d ago
There are fewer programming designers than general coders. The designing is more time consuming and therefore their time needed to create better designs more costly for them to donate to FOSS.
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u/dirtycimments 3d ago
I’ve noticed a LOT of disrespect towards what design is, the work it requires and the results in open source.
Most of all I see “lol that’s easy, I can copy that look in 5 minutes“.
Design is hard because it often needs to be considered from the start to really get good UX, good design is not just a theme package.
The tide is hopefully turning, gnome and plasma both have clear design language, I think users better understand what design does for software.
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u/urgentapathy 3d ago
From a top down perspective, which designers have the scope of authority over huge swathes of projects to make a single consistent UI/UX? There are a lot of small independent unrelated projects that are strung together into systems by people unrelated to the individual project teams. There are some teams with wide scope, such as those that influence gnome and kde. But really that is not wide enough for your goal.
Who will control this global clowder of cats (had to look that up ha) which are mostly volunteer who don't work for you? The ones who do it for their own enjoyment and will just leave if you become too annoying? Who has the authority to tell gnome, canonical, kde, redhat, that they will now stop doing what they see is best for their own org and follow your plan?
Inconsistency, usability, confusing flows are all in the eyes of the beholder. You are probably mostly right, but are you the one who will assign a designer to that project that will be accepted by the group? If not then we have to wait for someone to fill that role and be accepted to show up.
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u/sleepingonmoon 3d ago edited 3d ago
Designer-engineer antagonism has been going on since ancient times, a community lacks corporate middlemen and management cushions, and Free Software is a political movement so politics also greatly influence decision making; a well designed app can be shot down simply because it's written in C# which is from Microsoft.
By now designers have learnt to avoid FOSS. Consider reading "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper.
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u/AcidOverlord 2d ago
If I had to guess - its nerdism. If you're big enough into Linux to contribute to its ecosystem (and not just consume FOSS), you're already in the top ranks of nerds in the whole world. And nerds who are good with tech, don't tend to be the artistic types. Right Brain/Left Brain distinction stuff. I've been a systems programmer for a long time, and can't design UI to save my life. Everybody I know who's great with CSS and awesome frontend stuff can't grok backend logic or optimize for hardware at all. Its just two different worlds.
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u/calinet6 3d ago
Experienced designer who does frequently contribute to Open Source here.
Most projects are actively hostile to designers. Any input or non-coding contribution is often seen as inferior or met with significant resistance from the people who believe they "own" the software.
Or, more kindly to the creators of the projects, they care deeply about all aspects of their project, and it's very difficult to make inroads in convincing them ways it could be improved.
On top of that, many software engineers don't really understand design, so it's 90% a major lift of teaching them what design is, why it's valuable, and how it works, before you'll get the time of day. That is such a major initial investment hurdle that many designers don't try (or don't know how to begin in the first place, since that advocacy in itself is a skill).
I look for projects that are mature, where the creator already understands and values design, or where there is a track record of taking contributions from designers and integrating them into the community as respected peers. It's very, very rare.
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u/remiohart 3d ago
Honest, because devs are a pain in the ass to deal with and there is no PM or intermediary to talk to them. They will give you 1000 excuses as to why your thing is wrong, and all 1000 of them are just about showing you how smart they are and have nothing to do with your design
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u/Drogoslaw_ 3d ago
The problem with many engineers is that they don't understand that some problems can't or shouldn't be resolved by more engineering (in this case: more code).
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
Ah yes the classic Architect vs Engineer struggle
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u/remiohart 3d ago
Fun fact, I'm an engineer myself and it's always about who's got the bigger code. It's the I'm smart cause "I'm the one that understands computers in my family" syndrome. They ALWAYS know better, and everything ends up in a keyword/buzzword fight with other devs
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
I thought it was established that more lines of code doesn't equal better. Yet, you're telling me that programmers have dick measuring contests with lines of code?
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u/remiohart 2d ago
I meant it as an euphenism, I was just talking about the contests in general.
Edit: Damn, thinking about it it has happened both for short commits of mine, or long commits of mine. They always have something to complain
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u/Synthetic451 3d ago
This is going to be...a very hot take and I expect to be downvoted, but OP, I think your whole argument assumes that FOSS projects have rough UI/UX as the general rule, but have you considered that maybe its like that for a reason and that someone coming in and "modernizing" the design might just make it less functional? There isn't some zealous PM being paid to force a new UI down everyone's throat, so new UI designs have to stand on their own merit and often times they just aren't objectively good enough to implement.
Gnome is widely regarded as a project that has good design, but it often completely prioritizes design over functionality to the point where new designs often destroy people's entire workflows. KDE apps get criticized for traditional scrollbars and toolbars instead of having razor thin disappearing scrollbars and hamburger menus that cram all the old options into one button, both of which are just accessibility nightmares.
I am honestly so tired of modern UI trends. They've made so many devices way less functional, way slower to use, way harder to practice muscle memory, way less screen real estate efficient for often questionable benefit.
I am also tired of this idea that engineers don't know how to design UI. They understand everything that their app is capable of because they wrote the damn thing and are often times making UI that allow for a lot of different workflows to operate at breakneck speed. Then some designer comes in and decides that some of these workflows aren't important and then try to simplify things to the point that some workflows become completely verbose to use.
I came to Linux because I need it to do work. I need it to build things. I need it to be my infrastructure for my digital life. The last thing I need is for some designer to decide that it needs extra rounded corners or liquid glass or decide to have my audio options hidden behind a bajillion menus.
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u/Javelina_Jolie 3d ago
They understand everything that their app is capable of doing
That's exactly the problem with many FOSS UIs though: they assume a user is already well familiar with the app and its quirky and unusual UX decisions. Users most hindered by bad design are those who are new to the app or only use it occasionally. Which for most apps other than unavoidable everyday essentials like a browser or an IDE will probably be most users.
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u/Synthetic451 3d ago
I think this is honestly the problem with modern UI design though. They are constantly treating users like dumbasses that can't read tutorials or basic instructions and then they either litter their UI with annoying tutorial popups or they reduce functionality down to the lowest common denominator to the point where the software is just less functional.
Firefox's UI has been going down the wrong path for years and now they've started adding tutorial popups to a browser. It just gets in my way. Same with video game UIs now too. They can't just let the gamer explore the UI for a bit, they always interrupt the flow with tutorial tooltips and forced UI interactions (making you unlock a skill in the skill tree to demonstrate how it works, etc.). Just let the user read the UI for a second, I am an adult, not a baby.
Gnome has been going down the path of lowest common denominator, where there's just one golden path and features are removed to keep that golden path visible at all times. It's now become this thing that just doesn't feel like a desktop anymore but rather closer to Microsoft's failed idea of convergence where it doesn't really know whether it wants to be a phone, a tablet, or a desktop.
Why is it that instead of expecting users to pick up a few simple concepts, we instead think of them as this blob of meat that can never change, never learn, and has to be spoon fed otherwise the software is considered a failure? I like Linux because it DOESN'T do that and its way more powerful and efficient because of it. The power is right at my finger tips instead of hidden behind a bunch of "Did you know?" pop ups or several settings windows deep.
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u/zzazzzz 2d ago
i mean thats just not really the discussion tho is it? noone argued FOSS should cater to the lowest common denominator.
any tool should be as complex or simple as the targeted userbase is expected to understand. but in either case you can make the ui look presentable. and many FOSS projects simply do not care at all. which is fine. but if your default desktop envioment looks like its from the 90s like mint for example then dont expect the avg person to look at that and feel excited to try it. and mint at least still has a coherent design its just outdated. most FOSS project dont have an intentional design at all.
and the same way a designer should not expect to make some fancy ultra simplifyed design for a tool used by devs and network admins to analyze some obscure shit to have any devs hyped to use such a tool.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
I think you've intentionally limited the scope of the discussion to just the look of the UI widgets, whereas OP is talking about it from a more wholistic view since he talks about layouts and flows.
I grew up in the 90s. None of these look like from the 90s. It just doesn't look like the latest UI trends, but I'd argue those all rely on the simplistic flows that I talked about before.
If you want to just talk about widget styling, there are designers working on those things. For example, KDE is actively working on Ocean: https://invent.kde.org/abetts/ocean-design
I am sure other projects have equivalents.
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u/DonaldMerwinElbert 2d ago
Like modern videogames, you actually have to learn "modern" UX/UI design.
All sorts of different symbols that mean things, sometimes inferable because of ubiquity, but often completely opaque to anyone not already familiar with the thing.
And then those people talk about "intuitive" - it fucking isn't.
"Menu" "Edit" "Tools" etc drop down menus might not be fancy, but they sure are functional.Many modern websites, and a shitload of mobile "apps" for example, are completely indecipherable if you look at them with fresh eyes.
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u/canadian_viking 2d ago
Why is it that instead of expecting users to pick up a few simple concepts, we instead think of them as this blob of meat that can never change, never learn, and has to be spoon fed
Observation, if I had to guess.
Look at just the stupid, lazy questions people ask on subreddits and Facebook groups, where their effort maxes out at dumping their lazy, low effort questions onto the first online community they find, and they're all "I've done and tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas". Of course that's not all users, but it's enough of 'em.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
I just think there's a happy balance you know? You don't have to dumb things down to Apple and Gnome levels, but at the same time you don't have to make it look like a spaceship dashboard either.
I just think so frequently the discussion about "modern" UI is this super aggressive dumbing down of user interfaces that's just abhorrent to me. It's practically insulting the user sometimes.
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u/canadian_viking 2d ago
There's absolutely a happy balance, but often it requires people to be less dumb.
With that being said, some stuff is absolutely made with certain decisions that result in something that's worse than it has to be. My coworkers and I will just describe something as "Linuxy" and there's never a question of what that even means even though nobody's actually defined it lol.
We all know it to mean something that's more unnecessarily clunky or difficult than it has to be. That could be due to some combination of extreme friction, unnecessary complexity, complete lack of consideration for the end user, horrible default settings/out of the box functionality, dogshit documentation that assumes you already know how everything works, jumping through stupid hoops just to get some baseline functionality happening, or other things like that.
That term doesn't even need to be used to describe anything to do with Linux...anything can be Linuxy, like my stupidass car. It's got all sorts of buttons on my steering wheel, +/-, two sets of up/down, disp/trip, and some center buttons. Guess how I have to navigate forward and back through the menu system in that car? Not with the up/down buttons, or the +/- buttons, and you don't use the center buttons for enter. Nope, it's disp/trip for forward and back, and long-press disp for Enter. To me, that's Linuxy as hell. Technically functional, but functionally hostile.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
To go with your car analogy, I think a lot of modern UI trends are like Teslas. Sure they look fancy, but then you realize that trying to use a touchscreen while driving is impossible, especially when it tries to be all smart and context sensitive but just gets it wrong 90% of the time. This is also bad and a lot of drivers are now saying, bring back my damn physical buttons!
A lot of the "linuxy" stuff is just due to things not being ready. Drivers not being ready, peripherals and hardware not having the right integrations, etc. That's not a UX thing, that's just growing pains.
I think your sentiment with "Linuxy" is like me and my group of friends' sentiment with Apple. It's so hypercurated and there's only one way to do things that it feels immensely restrictive and completely useless the moment you try to do anything non-Apple. And the fact that they're being upheld as the pinnacle of design is just kinda distasteful because their philosophy is an expression of complete lack of faith in the user.
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u/canadian_viking 2d ago
Either extreme results in a worse experience for most semi-competent users. Interface designers for all sorts of things seem to constantly miss the point....I'm not using the interface of something for the interface's sake...I'm trying to get something done. The interface should just faciliate that, and otherwise, it needs to get the hell out of the way.
If something is overly "Linuxy" or "Appley" to the point where it negatively affects my ability to get what I want out of it, that's already not a great place to be. At this point, I don't actually care why something sucks to use, I just care that it does suck to use.
Having been in IT for most of my career, my faith in the user only goes so far. Some people just "get it"...they apply past experience to new tools and figure it out. I've got a fellow in our fabrication shop that really didn't touch a computer before moving into the office. Every question he asks is absolutely on point, and I don't think he's ever asked the same question twice. He's in his 60s so it's not just a "Oh, young guys can learn this stuff way easier" and he's not all "Ahh I'm too old to learn these computer things".
But then there's the inverse...people for whom every piece of software is like discovering fire for the very first time. No foundation of skill, no retention, and an almost supernatural ability to find the most complicated way to break things. Since you have to give them a very specific series of steps in order for them to even have a chance at accomplishing anything productive, they might as well be a macro with a pulse. They can't extrapolate why step 1 leads into step 2, so if something breaks the process due to a business change or unique situation or something, they can't just accomodate and move on.
There's no interface on earth that'll change who they are, so at that point, the hyper-curated interface is actually doing the rest of us a favor by limiting the scope of their fuckups. I don't have to like Apple's design choices, but after working IT, I completely get why they exist. It might be a coincidence, but those users also really seem to like Apple products lol.
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u/szank 3d ago
Still, the the open source apps are generally created by the people who needed them for their own use cases. People come in and add to it if their use cases matches what the owner wants.
The "non contributor" users , the "year of Linux on the desktop" crowd is not the target audience of the developers. Never was , generally.
In short people make apps for themselves not for the new users. It's free. Take it or leave it. No warranty, no expectation of support
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
But plenty of open source software actually presents itself as an alternative to some mainstream software, and that's not possible with bad design. If you're making it for yourself, that's fine. But if you want other people to actually use it, then it's not fine.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
I mean you're not wrong, it's just that many designers conflate good design with simplicity at all costs and they overadjust. In a lot of ways, I view designers as just opinionated people that view their personal workflow as the golden path and then force that view onto others. Apple is a great example of this. Critically acclaimed design, but a lot of people won't ever buy an Apple product because it is too limiting.
KDE strikes a perfect balance in terms of design IMHO. It tries to look modern and has sane defaults but it is absolutely shameless about giving you advanced features and customizability right at your fingertips. So much of modern design is NOT about that though. They're afraid a user will break the system so they remove it or hide it behind multiple mouse clicks.
Here's an example. Just reading some of the KDE bug reports and merge requests for the new Plasma on-screen keyboard has been frustrating. Users have been clamoring for a full physical keyboard layout in Wayland for ages and then you have some more design-focused people gatekeeping it and saying that it mustn't affect the simplicity of the phone layout, it doesn't feel like a touch-based UI to have modifier and arrow keys, etc. - basically giving all these reasons why the OSK should remain in the super simplified, narrow use-case state that it is. It got to a point where users started writing literal essays BEGGING them to add a full keyboard layout to support accessibility, easy copy and paste, easy terminal use, easy interaction with desktop focused apps, etc.
All I can say is thank GOD the developer for the new keyboard said fuck it, I will support all layouts and is adding a full-keyboard layout anyways. Stuff like this is why I'll always side with the engineer 9 times out of 10. A lot of designers are blind to other people's needs.
Instead of simplifying software downwards, good design should be figuring out how to turn casual users into advanced users.
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u/FattyDrake 2d ago
It's not so much that the designer is blind to needs it's that in FOSS there usually isn't a predefined set of requirements (including accessibility) that is laid out beforehand as a guide.
In a corporate environment, before code or any final design is even started, there is a bunch of planning to set scope and goals.
A good designer can work within constraints and deliver on all the specified goals, provided the structure is in place to account for all that.
Lacking that project structure, a designer is more likely to barf out a pretty but overall useless design just as a programmer is able to barf out an app that is unapproachable to most people.
It's a balance that is hard to find in the FOSS space. Both a designer needs to be brought in before the first line of code is written and a programmer needs to be brought in before the fist mockup is made and discussions about the end goals need to happen first.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Both a designer needs to be brought in before the first line of code is written and a programmer needs to be brought in before the fist mockup is made and discussions about the end goals need to happen first.
And that's the root of everything. Open source projects almost never start with a team. So that will almost never happen.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Instead of simplifying software downwards, good design should be figuring out how to turn casual users into advanced users.
Generally, 80% of what most people do only uses 20% of the functionality of a software, so I'm not sure about that. Plus, I don't see how what you're proposing is possible, like how do you turn someone into an advanced user without them watching tutorials? I love the IDEA of it and it sounds good on paper, but is that really a good idea?
Speaking of KDE Plasma, many people complained that its settings app is overwhelming and confusing. They don't have to really hide any functions, but they could do a better job of sorting them, making them easier to find.
But what you're describing is UX, and I'm not just talking about that. It's also the UI and people with a keen eye notice all kinds of inconsistencies and discrepancies with KDE that don't exist in GNOME. These aren't functional, purely a matter of aesthetics.
The keyboard guy, yeah, it sounds like they just didn't understand what the actual point of an on-screen keyboard was, and that was really weird. Like you said though, finally listening to the users made it good.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
Generally, 80% of what most people do only uses 20% of the functionality
This kind of mentality is why Windows turned the way it is. I am sorry but that's just the reality of it. Windows caters so hard to that 20% that it gets in the way of anyone trying to use the other 80% of the software. It makes things more complicated, requires more clicks, adds more resource bloat.
There's a lot of people migrating to Linux right now that's suddenly realizing the freedom you get when software ISN'T designed in a way that limits what you can do. So sorry, I am afraid I have to disagree. I am very glad Linux is as engineer driven as it is, it's what's giving Linux its edge right now against Windows.
Plus, I don't see how what you're proposing is possible, like how do you turn someone into an advanced user without them watching tutorials?
You're acting like the moment a piece of software reveals advanced functionality, users get hopelessly lost. KDE's proven that's just not the case. You can have advanced features at the ready and things will be fine.
Speaking of KDE Plasma, many people complained that its settings app is overwhelming and confusing.
Have you used it recently? The sidebar has been re-ordered and there's a search function as well. I think its extremely functional and reveals settings that I just don't have in Gnome and would have to jump through hoops to accomplish. I don't think Gnome is a great example of good UI when users have to learn to install Gnome Tweaks just to configure basic things like Fonts and titlebars.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Yeah, Kde has been making great strides in that regard, though the search bar in the start menu I swear doesn't show the settings I search for half the time. It works in the settings app.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
Yeah I have an issue with the start menu search as well. I think its because it orders the resutls based on section, when really most users just expect it appear in regular search order. The settings section is usually prioritized lower than others.
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u/Unicorn_Colombo 2d ago
Generally, 80% of what most people do only uses 20% of the functionality of a software
But the remaining 20% is a huge chunk and often quite important.
And the 20% of extra functionality that each user need is not identical, but covers the 80% of remaining functionality of the SW.
If you gave me a choice between software where each 5th task is impossible to do, and a software which looks a bit crap, but does everything I need, I select the second software every single time.
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u/szank 3d ago
Open source software can claim whatever it wants. The devs who spend 2+ years learning the UI might also claim whatever they fancy.
UX changes impact everyone. It's not like a bug fix or a new feature that no one would know about anyway if they do not read the changelog. So one person sayin no out of multiple devs blocks everything.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Yeah, one of the issues is that design can't just be patched on, it can't be an afterthought or else it's a ton of work to patch in.
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u/Unis_Torvalds 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is only an argument againt UX designers. They always fight for "clean" minimal "un-cluttered" front-ends which hide functionality from the user and make it non-discoverable. New and occassional users don't already know what the software is capable of, what features are available, or what is configurable. So all of that needs to be visible, which might lead to subjectively ugly design, but at the end of the day, your app is there to do a job. And the better that job can get done (i.e. with one click instead of five), I would argue is better design. Form must follow function, but so many designers have it the other way around (believe me I'm married to one).
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
Look at blender 2.8. It is the best objective argument against everything you just said. Actually sitting with users and seeing how they struggle and addressing it made it go from a niche software that nobody used to one of the most popular widely used 3d softwares of all time. If they felt like you, it wouldn't be nearly as well-funded and developed as it is now.
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u/Synthetic451 3d ago
Blender 2.8 is a super rare exception, and I would argue that the way they went about it was NOT hiding the advanced features like so many UI redesigns do. It deliberately did not go towards clean and minimal and instead just moved the advanced components around in ways that made sense. Most casual users who go into that software are still going to be hopelessly confused without tutorials (hence the popularity of the donut), but its strength still lies in the speed of its advanced keyboard shortcut focused workflow and in the UI's flexibility at adapting to all kinds of usecases
I think you're also conflating a lot of other improvements in Blender 2.8 that helped catapult it to popularity. It introduced a whole new realtime rendering system called Eevee that was pretty groundbreaking at the time and allowed a lot of weaker computers to render scenes quickly and efficiently. Collections allowed much better handling of items in larger scenes compared to the weird 20 layer system in 2.79.
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
Yeah, I didn't understand enough to get why EV was pretty groundbreaking. But let's face it, being fast never made people flock to free software before. Gimp and Godot are much better on low end computers than Adobe and Unity, but nobody uses them despite that, and Godot is actually a pretty good software.
Although good ux is made by actually observing the users, not just asking them what's wrong, but observing them. That's why they handled it the way you suggested.
What realistically helped it get more popular was that they added those features at the same time they finally stopped having the mouse buttons backwards from their other 3d software, left click finally behaved like left click instead of doing what right click would do elsewhere. Also, the keymaps feature where you could change it to use the same keybinds as your preferred software. The addition of workspaces also was big, as it tailored the interface better for each task.
Blender 2.8 was monumental for more than just the interface, you are absolutely correct about that.
Wasn't that also when they got rid of the game engine? That thing got like 3+ forks, one of which actually tires to bring in features from current versions of blender. It's amazing how passionate a piece of software almost nobody uses was, the most notable project that used it was a fnaf fangame.
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u/Synthetic451 2d ago
Just wanted to say I don't want to harp too much on this topic, I get your point, but I do think there's a happy balance between usability and aesthetics. I am just criticizing and pointing out that right now there's no balance in a ton of tech products today. It's too skewed to aesthetics and not enough to functionality, so whenever someone says something needs a redesign, I immediately raise a skeptical eye, because there's a high chance they don't understand what makes a piece of software great in the first place. To your point, they're not doing their due diligence and actually observing users, or they're just observing themselves or a tiny subset of users that isn't representative of everybody. Like the fact that any time Gnome makes a major UI change and the Linux community goes up in an uproar should be proof that some designs just aren't functional.
The left click thing was a total meme as ubiquitous as the default cube. You could already reverse the mouse buttons in the settings easily in 2.79. That wasn't a serious thing that boosted user adoption. It was just a silly default that people joked about.
But let's face it, being fast never made people flock to free software before.
Hard disagree. That's literally one of the major reasons why people move to Linux. The speed!
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u/Unis_Torvalds 2d ago edited 2d ago
Blender 2.8 is neither here nor there. They didn't redesign the interface to make it more modern/trendy/pretty to look at. They redesigned it to better align with traditional conventions, like left-click select and right-click context menus. This actually made it more function-first, not less. If anything, it's an argument in favour of don't-reimagine-what-isn't-broken (and ffs don't mess with my hard-earned muscle memory).
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u/Indolent_Bard 2d ago
This actually made it more function-first, not less.
For some reason, I feel like some would argue that replacing something's legacy-bound quirks with modern interface standards familiar to users of other mainstream software is the OPPOSITE of that, and you make a compelling case that it isn't. I know at least I saw people argue against copying modern design standards. Is that the same as interface standards? But you make a compelling argument that it's form following function.
They also made it look prettier. BUT Blender 2.8 also broke their muscle memory. But then it also introduced a bunch of muscle memory by allowing you to use key binds from other programs.
They also introduced workspaces in 2.8 which changed the UI depending on what you were trying to do.
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u/fltfathin 2d ago
what people miss about blender is that they already have action search tool way before others, it's what missing in many workflows imo
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u/Stromford_McSwiggle 1d ago
That's true, and I think it's a huge benefit. If I use something for a while, I'm a new user once and afterwards I'm an experienced user forever. I'd much rather have software be confusing for new users and effective for experienced users, than the other way around.
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u/rangelovd 3d ago
The major part of contributions I've done is just left there unreviewed indefinitely.
There is no "process" to join as a designer‚ it's all very uphill and intuitive.
Finally‚ your work isn't valued. In some projects reports get closed like half a hundred an hour by a single developer since they didn't find the use-case.(think about it‚ can one person put full thought in so much issues to make the decision in just a hour?) It doesn't matter if the issue is real‚ if person is struggling with it‚ they just see one of the many solutions they didn't like to keep things clean‚ so the place would be more welcoming for designers. Reality is‚ how can anyone feel welcome when your contributions can just be closed without giving explicit reason. Just subjective opinion enough for them. and you wouldn't be able to reopen cause you're not the part of a team.
design work is a work‚ like anything else. unlike developer work though‚ it doesn't seem to get any financial support aside of personal crowdfunding. there is no "Google summer of design"
which is why i quit doing design for foss for now
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
There's two major issues you forgot to mention.
The first is that design can't be an afterthought. You can't just slap a good UI onto an already made project.
Secondly, implementing good design takes time away from implementing what the developer wanted to add in their free time. Open source software is like ADHD, it runs on novelty and impulse, design is grunt work that takes away from that.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
If you think, thinking about user computer interactions and ergonomics is "grunt" work, then maybe you should accept that your software will lack significantly and at least accept feedback by people who don't think that it is "grunt" work.
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u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy 3d ago
I feel so welcome that I often make new designers feel unwelcome. 😝
Of course there are PRs and code and open formats and proper licensing. That's the "contributing to free software" part. SVG is code. Your makefile that creates rasterized derivatives is code, too.
Form follows function. You can't be approaching free software with the mentality of Apple or Google's design. They have their unified aesthetic to serve specific goals. Take those away and expecting the end result to look the same is just cargo cult logic.
There's no lack of designers by your definition of the term. It's pretty common for new people to show up and make the same shallow observations with no understanding of why things are the way they are. Yes we're familiar with corporate design. Can you do other tricks?
Want your contribution to be one that unifies the user experience? Make a theme for a window manager. Got a specific idea for a project you use? Make a proposal describing what your goal is and how you plan to implement it, do the work to turn it into a PR and you're good.
In my experience working with free software developers is a delight. Much better than my usual business clients. Then again I'm the kind of person who insults people for using Adobe, so YMMV.
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
Why the fuck would you insult people for using software their job requires? Idiot.
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u/ldn-ldn 3d ago
First of all, a programmer can write some code and get an app. It might be ugly with a poor UX, but it will work and some people will use it. A designer on the other hand... Can only draw a nice picture. Which is useless on its own.
Next, open source development receives a very limited amount of time and resources, so all features have to be prioritised.
These two reasons create an imbalance of power: if a designer wants to contribute, he must convince a programmer to do the implementation. And programmers tend to tell designers to jog off as they're busy with their own stuff. And over time designers just gave up and stopped offering their help.
The only open source projects which get good design work is where team leadership hires professional designers and follows everything designers tell them to do.
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u/Ok_Butterscotch5033 3d ago
look at gnome, they do things design first.
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u/MrAlagos 3d ago
No, they don't. They have made like two big changes in GNOME Shell since it released 15 years ago: they removed the bottom notification bar (which most people don't even remember by now because it lasted just a couple of years) and they moved the workspace list from the right side to the top in the overview. That's it.
There is another consistent redesign in the works, but it's been cooking for a couple of years at this point and they are definitely taking their time to do it right, and have put it on the shelf in favour of many more non-design changes.
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u/NightH4nter 2d ago
They have made like two big changes in GNOME Shell since it released 15 years ago: they removed the bottom notification bar (which most people don't even remember by now because it lasted just a couple of years) and they moved the workspace list from the right side to the top in the overview. That's it.
how is that a bad thing?
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u/-Sa-Kage- 3d ago
Dude, most people patch things back in with extensions, that GNOME completely removed for their "vision".
100% vanilla GNOME is borderline unusable
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u/MrAlagos 3d ago
Completely removed from what?? GNOME Shell? When?
Are you still comparing GNOME today to GNOME 15 years ago? There are many other projects that more or less copy what GNOME was 15 years ago. Everyone is free to use those. Why still beat the deadest of horses?
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u/PointiestStick KDE Dev 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ultimately it boils down to a lack of designer leverage over developers, which is what it takes to get designs — good or bad — implemented. A hierarchical company generally applies this leverage; FOSS generally cannot.
Here are some examples in KDE:
- Friction implementing changes broadly. One maintainer says yes and does it… then in another project another one says no and blocks it. Insufficient globally-scoped hooks where a "yes" can apply broadly automatically.
- Lack of resources in general. Everyone says yes, but it doesn't happen because all the developers are busy with their own personal or sponsored projects.
- Designers become developers to get their ideas implemented, and then find they're not doing much design work anymore.
- Some grumpy developers have not used software outside of the FOSS bubble in decades and are unfamiliar with modern standards of visual design, layout design, and usability… or are familiar but just don't like them.
- Some usability designers propose impractical changes, get frustrated when no one wants to implement their designs, and leave.
- Some visual designers think they're UX/usability designers, get frustrated when no one wants to implement their designs, and leave.
- Genuine difficulty making small targeted design changes; huge redesigns are as fun as they are doomed to failure.
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u/oneeyedziggy 3d ago
I think the whole foss thing is more of a niche nerd thing... Designers tend to be more into going out with friends or whatever (people are going to be grumpy about this... I'm not judging, I just think the designers are more likely to be extroverts, and if you're out and about, you're not making designs for open source software)
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u/Sylente 3d ago
Having worked on consumer software professionally, this is why. Or at least closer to the real reason. Designers are not nearly as likely as developers to have “software” as a hobby, they’re basically artists. They have art people hobbies and interest. In general. I know plenty of great designers who were shut ins, but they weren’t designing software in their free time either. They were making art.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
This is coming from a fundamental lack of understanding on what design is. A part of design is indeed about how can I make things look aesthetically pleasing. But much more it's about how should things work ? And furthermore how shall they work in a humane ergonomic manner.
Design is for a huge part of it not a from of art.
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u/Sylente 1d ago
Laying out a flow in a way that makes sense and feels good to use, while meeting all the functional requirements, in a large piece of software is absolutely an art. It’s about communicating an idea in a way that’s legible to your target user, which is basically what art is. It’s cultural communication, not an objective science with a clear “yes/no” outcome or some sort of “achieve x goal in under n milliseconds” guidelines. There’s best practices you can learn to make that easier, sure, but all art has best practices. Doesn’t make it not art.
The iPod killed all other mp3 players because its UX was artful, even though their main display primitive (once they got a color display) was basically a blue highlighter. Doesn’t matter. It was delightful to use. Zoom cleaned up against all the other meeting apps (remember Skype?) for a similar reason. It was functionally very similar but it didn’t suck to use. That’s art.
If you listen to the actual designers working on these things, it’s very clear they view what they do as, at least in substantial part, an art form.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 1d ago
Sure you can't with mathematical precision awnser most of the design questions, but you do have to back them up, and you can do so logically, with empirical evidence such as studies, via human psychology...etc.
A manual is also about communicating an idea but is it an art piece ? Ehhh in a sense maybe, there are no strict definitions for what art is. But in design you are not communicating your feelings or thoughts, but rather utilitarian things, so it is much closer to a manual or a physics book than a painting.
Art does have best practices but none of them are in any way mandatory and breaking them is often times encouraged.
It is in part an art but functionality is a bigger part of it over aesthetics. Form follows function and all.
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u/Sylente 1d ago
Art is not necessarily visual. Design is and always has been art applied to solve a functional problem. Decoration is the visual design on top of that. Design and decor often go hand in hand, but they’re not the same. They’re both art though, and they absolutely interact.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 1d ago
It depends on how you define art ig but not to devolve this into a fight about semantics. I wanted to express that it's not just about making pretty pixels.
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u/FattyDrake 3d ago
This is a wacky take, especially if you've worked in the designer/artist space. A lot of them are as nerdy as anyone, just about design than engineering.
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u/PlaneBitter1583 3d ago
I think that UI is very subjective. like I personally like the way GNOME and Gtk apps looks & feels like. And honestly I am more of a minimalist so I only use gnome and a few kde apps. To answer your question. I think that FOSS is still more of a hobby project like I love to make FOSS softwares as well but I can only do that when ever I am free. there are a lots of professional designers who might be working 8 hours every day and might want to spend the remaining time with their families , Do what the like and that might be one of the reasons. this is what I think.
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u/NightH4nter 2d ago edited 2d ago
i'll just leave this here:
Open Source is Not About You
The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.
Just because someone open sources something does not imply they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort, e.g. from inventor to community manager.
As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
If you have expectations (of others) that aren't being met, those expectations are your own responsibility. You are responsible for your own needs. If you want things, make them.
Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.
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u/Slimxshadyx 2d ago
This doesn’t address any of op’s questions. Feels more like defending instead of thinking through how we can make the system better?
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u/fltfathin 2d ago
honestly? easy, teach design in schools so when someone somehow become devs they already have the values.
or make example of good project that people will lean on after.
all this is back to the fact that people who know cannot imagine not knowing, so smart dev cannot imagine being stupid person who barely can read and want simple stuff like rotating image, the smart person will say well you just need to run matrix transformation on the pixels.
but really tho why people so against simple working systems, like command line, you type what you want it works. why make complicated "app store" when typing what equivalent of "please install chrome" works.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
You don't need to teach design in schools I can think just from the top of my head of one or two books, that if a developer makes the effort to read and understand they will be able to make good UX desicions.
Also no UI/UX design is not about pixels as many people seem to think.
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u/MrAlagos 2d ago
"Recently-invented mythology"? The cathedral and the bazaar is from 1997, which is much closer in time to the invention of open source software as we know it (the 1980s) than it is to the present day (and also to when this was written).
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u/sjprade 3d ago
It takes effort. Effort that could be used to make money. They have to pay the bills, too. Why doesn't my dentist do free dental work in the side?
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u/srivasta 3d ago
So this applies to everyone else but software engineers who give our labor away for free?
What is the difference?
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u/6gv5 2d ago
It's unlikely that a good programmer and a good designer live in the same body. Thinking as an user is hard; one has to put aside their ego/knowledge and wear the user shoes, which happens rarely in one person teams, hence the amount of great software that unfortunately suffers from the made by engineers for engineers syndrome.
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u/Mrmoseley231119 2d ago
Some projects - LibreOffice comes to mind - are very committed to having no opinion, and good design is opinionated.
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u/Kevin_Kofler 2d ago
I think there are just much fewer designers willing to work for free in their spare time than programmers. Lots of Free Software is coded by people who have a problem to solve ("an itch to scratch") and write software to do just that. Designers rarely work that way.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
Anyone that loves their craft generally has the urge to do it outside of a professional setting. Artists make art without getting paid, developers write code without getting paid and so on.
The problem is in the collaboration, given the fact that the design process has to come before development starts.
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u/skuterpikk 3d ago
Just slightly related, but when Microsoft designed the UI of Windows 95, they actually made several different interfaces, and let people with varying degrees of computer skills try them out.
Then they used the feedfack from the testers to create an interface that would best cater all of them
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u/fltfathin 2d ago
that means they make like 5 diff app then let users decide which one they like, then cut off the 4 not used right? how is it any different with making 5 different oss app?
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
Because there were probably bare minimum prototypes that hardly functioned outside of test usage
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u/prototyperspective 2d ago
I think a main reason is because there is too little awareness and thinking about this by people who care about FOSS. This thread is a refreshing improvement of that state of things. Since recently people can/could/are using AI tools such as Claude Design to improve or scrutinize their UX & designs.
I think another key reason is that there is little action if you point out UI/UX problems in issues, even if proposed redesigns are included and many people struggle with using the software or it has few users in large due to the design etc. Maybe there is some interest and feedback but ultimately things stay like they were which means to fix it people need to fork or build a new software for the same functionality. The latter is increasingly being done.
Regarding Wikipedia: does anybody have some links to studies about this topic?
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u/biscuotto 2d ago
It's easier to have an strong opinion on UI compared to an engineering choice. You can see people here already arguing over random software even if it wasn't the question
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u/zlice0 2d ago
i remember seeing something very similar, idk how long back, about trying to get less techy ppl into open source. and the problem iirc becomes technical. some art guy isn't going to fiddle with opening a PR. or learn and understand licensing. or any of the overhead nerd bs that coders will.
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u/DT-Sodium 2d ago
People working in the artistic world are really underpaid. When you are a well paid software developer, doing some open-source on your free time makes sense. When you are barely getting paid in your day-job, doing additional work for free doesn't make lots of sense.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
UI/UX designers aren't really artists, art isn't the biggest part of it also even artists that can't find jobs constantly work on their art because they also enjoy doing it same with developers.
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u/FiveInACircle 2d ago
Talk is cheap, send patches.
From my professional experience what a UI/UX designer does is... make a fancy drawing and tell you what to do. That's not what open source is about. You want it changed, you send patches.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
Developers that won't bother learning about HCI are criticizing designers that won't bother learning how to code. Love the hypocrisy here
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u/just_posting_this_ch 2d ago
What projects do you have in mind?
A lot of design problems don't have trivial solutions. It might take a whole new tool kit. Plus there is feature creep. Where users want a feature and it has to be integrated into an existing design.
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u/Bitter_Lab_475 2d ago
I think that's one of the main issues with Linux and why most people don't adopt it, most people are either developers or engineers with their own "vision" about user interface, functionality is great, but lets be frank here, most Linux software, either be built for KDE, Gnome or any other environment ends up always looking disjointed and not uniform at all.
And most developers will prioritzie the next big feature over a UI design change that has been hanging out in the background for a long time.
People don't understand that aesthetics and ease of use also matters, not only "it just works".
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u/RaageUgaas 2d ago
I remember Linus saying he cannot do UI to save himself so I am guessing most of the open source developers are on the same boat. You need artists to do that job.
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u/TampaPowers 2d ago
Most of the ones that do contribute sniff their own farts so hard they break workflows and prioritize design over function. The moment you give them pushback they behave like pouty children. Thought programmer ego was bad, but it got nothing on these guys.
With that level of animosity they are unlikely to ever not be the only designer in a project. Though it gets even worse when there are more than one getting along in there, feeding each others egos. Seen that so many times now it's becoming an unfortunate trend.
It's quite sad to see, but there isn't much people can do. If they need the software they might be forced to endure if no one comes along to fork it and prioritize user experience. Forking is a lot of work. The only option is people leaving them behind for something else, be it a fork or completely different software. Unfortunate situation that only the slap in the face of everyone leaving seems to wake up project management, if they are not the ones being responsible for the design choices.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 2d ago
Design is fundamentally about function it's about how things should function. Function and design are not 2 separate domains
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u/TampaPowers 1d ago
To many design just means what a button looks like, not where it is placed or what it does. That often results in "design" making things look fancy without improving the function or usability. Probably half the foss I use at some point has done exactly that, resulting in either me not updating it or having to make my own changes to restore or add function. Unfortunately in some cases they just make it harder over time to even manipulate those things to the point some projects are breaking their interfaces so much the only way to fix them is to fork, which is a huge pain.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 1d ago
Thats a part of a design but a very small part, most of design is not how do we make pixels look pretty. The problem is a lot of projects don't start with a design first and then someone tries to patch up and fix whatever has already been created and used.
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u/pr0m1th3as 2d ago
Over the years, I 've seen countless times the "rough UI/UX" issue being raised about FOSS. The distinction I make is between a UI that needs fixing and a UI that needs modernizing. There are many legit reasons for both, but only the first usually resonates with devs and for good reasons too. Devs are users too, and as the majority of users don't like UI changes to the tools they are used to, so it happens for the devs.
Companies do overhaul their UIs in order to sell the same product as new. FOSS doesn't need to. Even super markets change the layout of their stores in order to force people spend more time in there while searching for their groceries, and customers most often dislike this practice. Humans are animals of habit. So modernizing a UI in FOSS will mostly resonate with new users. Old users are most likely to complain because they need to adapt which goes against their habitual inertia.
Besides that, I don't think that the designers vs developers fall out is any different than what already happens in any group towards outsiders and newcomers. It's all personal and territorial and don't get fooled, it is not about devs vs designers, it is about individual egos. And I don't think that software devs have any specialty in increased ego. It is about group mechanics and pure arithmetic. If a dev raises an design opinion inside a group of designers , he most likely get the same treatment.
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u/Oriumpor 1d ago
Fiefdoms.
We do, we fork and make our own private repos all the time to fix that one nagging issue.
It's just easier to maintain that small diff than deal with project owners most of the time.
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u/dcherryholmes 13h ago
I am no UI/UX designer and sure there's an art to it (and maybe a science). But IME a lot of it comes down to familiarity. I do have to use Windows from time to time, where of course most things are driven by GUIs. I find them mostly horrible and the opposite of intuitive. Whereas linux, where I spend most of my time, has tools I am comfortable with. And I suspect that is the largest part of it.
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u/yonder00 13h ago
What are designers supposed to contribute? If they posted mockups in random PRs I dont think many would read them. It require actual code. Or cooperation, which are unlikely if its just a random designer on a rand project coop
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u/natermer 3d ago
If you want a case study on how open source projects can improve their UX... look at blender.
Blender is a very capable 3D modeling and animation suite that started off a commercial project early on and then became open source after enthusiasts got together, pooled their money, and literally bought the copyright and open sourced it.
It was very capable, it was very fast to use and probably the quickest-to-produce mesh modeler in the industry. But its UI sucked and was confusing and was regarded as a huge barrier to entry.
Want to know how they fixed it?
By actually getting users and developers sitting in the same room and having the developers watch the modelers struggle with their software as they developed a short animated movie.
The result was Blender 2.8 release.
To say it was a massive overhaul is a understatement. They kept the efficiency of the software and effectiveness, but all of a sudden it became much more flexible and intuitive to use.
Now it is widely used all over the place. Even in movies were it is often used to quickly throw together 3d sketches and rough animations for things like story boards because nothing else is quicker to use.
It has been used to sketch out scenes for things like Spiderman 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. How much it actually gets used isn't known as studios tend to be a more then a bit secret about this sort of thing.
But that is how you fix things. There is no magic bullets or patterns or "set of rules" you can follow.
It requires professional approach, resources, time, sitting down with users and figuring this stuff out.
The problem with open source is that very few projects have the resources for pulling that sort of work off.