[matt4077]

Som here are missing the point in the other direction – this isn't about "design" as in "please give me a shiny UI", or "fewer buttons". The paper makes this point quite explicitly:

"These weaknesses have spurred the development of com- mand line wrappers and GUIs whose primary goal is to re- move some of Git’s complexity (most notably, EasyGit [1] and GitHub’s desktop client). These make largely cosmetic changes, through more attractive user interfaces, more con- sistent terminology in commands and documentation, and a focus on more commonly used commands. But their suc- cess seems to have been fairly limited, and most people still use the command line interface distributed with Git as their primary frontend, or fall back to it for accomplishing more complex tasks.

We believe that the usability problems of Git run deeper, and can only be addressed by a more fundamental reworking that reconsiders the underlying concepts. This is not to say that such a reworking cannot be achieved in a lightweight fashion. Indeed, our own reworking hides Git behind a ve- neer just as these other tools do. The difference however, is that we are willing to completely reconsider the core con- cepts that are presented to the user."