The "Open source developers don’t care about UI" trope is incredibly insulting.
It’s like telling the forth runner across the finish line at a marathon they clearly don’t care about winning.
Nobody wants their app to look bad. We can and do look at other apps and try to follow trends. Trends change rapidly and UI development is difficult and time consuming.
@daniel I agree that open source devs do care for UIs, but in my view, they shouldn't necessarily follow trends. Following trends is often staying behind and seeing yourself forced to break compatibilities. We should have our own ideas, preferably long termed.
@daniel The problem is two-fold in my opinion: a lot of programmers aren't willing to find and invite UI designers who can do things that they cannot, but also, good designers are notoriously unwilling to contribute to FOSS without being paid.
@daniel the generalization is strange because there are many type of open source projects, ranging from one single person doing things mainly for their own use, to thousands of developers working at Google.
Some of these can live a very long and succesful life with a bad UI. So do many closed source ones. And then, when there's a bad ui, it's not necessarily because developers don't care, maybe because they don't know how to do it, or their workflow and policies doesn't allow for it
@daniel UI design is also not an easy skill to learn. In an ecosystem where everyone is volunteering their time and effort, it’s important to remember that everyone is trying their best.
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@daniel and, if I may say so as an ardent open source user, most apps DO have a good UI
@daniel And it comes mostly from people who change the design just when you get used to the previous design change.
Give me a simple UI/UX that just works, rather than one that I have to relearn every 3 months because there is some new design trend that everyone thinks they have to implement.
@daniel well what I think it's difficult for one single person to do everything alone.
@daniel this coincidentally turned up in my feed the evening after I first saw your post!
@daniel I do think that hits on part of the issue, the "try to follow trends", this is an endless fight that has a constantly moving goal post. I think it's far more important to have a clear vision of what you're trying to achieve and adjust course as you realize certain assumptions you had don't apply in the real world.
As a developer I've realized that the sad thing is not that I don't care about UI but that I just want something different from a UI. The knowledge and skills that make me a developer also give me different priorities and cost/benefits from UI
And if I'm writing code primarily for myself (which is what FLOSS developers often do) then of course I want to make something that suits me and people like me.
@daniel HIG was a pioneer in specifying a consistent guideline for UIs. Actually, most innovations begin in open source contexts---e.g., most research and standardization outcomes. Closed source projects just have more effort allocated to marketing to make people think they do innovate.
@daniel This, but mostly: people will complain loudly and bitterly about anything that doesn't work exactly like they've already decided it should... unless it comes from a megacorp, in which case any broken, fugly piece of crap is the best thing since sliced bread and a landmark of quality design.
@daniel
"Good looking" and "functional/working for me/everyone" are vastly different.
The thing is that people (sometimes me) want to open a program/app for the first time and understand everything at once, even if they never used anything else for what they want to do. There is the perception that one has defined the use case completely in the mind, and then the reality makes it clear that things are complicated, with more moving parts than thought. Thats the hour of UI/X criticism. ...
@daniel I don't think it's a bad thing for UX to suck in FOSS. Many of these programs were created simply for the use of their author with no expectations past that, which is *why* they're open source. The expectation is that those who care about the software will become involved in its development, generally, or fork it into something else.
I personally don't think UX trends are the be-all and end-all. Chasing trends will just run you around in circles. It's better to have sane defaults that people can modify for their own use case, which is an approach that a lot of successful FOSS apps utilize
@daniel I don't think UI being dogshit is confined to open source developers. That said the one I am using right now is and it just gets worse and worse with time so I emphatically reject the notion that it is just 'too hard' to do properly. I do not understand this braindead obsession with narrow columns of text.
@BrodieOnLinux @daniel I wish software stopped following trends 😭 I am unbelievably glad LibreOffice never adopted the MS Office "ribbons".
@daniel I really like this post and I'm a UX Designer, or whatever you wanna call it. I really want to use my skills and knowledge to support open source projects, but I've been really struggling with connecting to projects. Most of the time when I reach out to help I don't hear anything back.
Am I doing something wrong or is this a common trend in the community? Do open source projects want designers to help? Some of the comments on this thread insinuate to me that maybe people don't want designers involved and I'm confused.
@perksofbeingben I can only speak for myself and a 500 char Mastodon post doesn’t leave enough room for nuances.
However: In my experience there is often an under appreciation for how tedious and time consuming it is to go from UI mock-up to actual working UI code. Oversimplified example: I understand that you want this button to be round and right aligned; I agree that it looks better. It will take me a week of fighting against the UI framework to implement that.
@perksofbeingben Even a 'shitty' UI might have taken days to develop; So depending on how and when you approach a project you might inadvertently be telling them "throw all that away and start from scratch (and spent another couple of weeks implementing that)"
@perksofbeingben My personal suggestion (and I don’t know how applicable that is to the rest of the Open Source Community): Either make small, incremental suggestions that feel like they can be accomplished in an afternoon or get in early with a project that doesn’t have a full UI yet. Then your mockup won’t feel like "let’s redo everything from scratch"
Shameless plug: https://Ltt.rs is in early stages with many UI screens missing.
@daniel each time I tried to contribute to open source projects in a UI/UX design way, the communities rejected my work. It's not about the "old timey look", it's about who are welcomed aboard
@daniel
Love your conversations app, but only wish for custom backgrounds.
Should I trust monocles which takes your app and gives me that feature 🙂