[jchw]

I don't love Git because it’s got a great UX. I love Git because of what can be done once you get past the awful UX.

The first year or two of Git usage ended in many, many incidents of lost work. That is not good UX for source control, its the most catastrophic UX imaginable for something designed to track source changes...

That’s why the site this post is about exists. If you don’t know about reflog, you are severely disadvantaged... and many of my coworkers at my previous employer certainly did not.

[dllthomas]

I guess I'm arguing that UX extends beyond command names and learning curves (while definitely incorporating those things). I'm on-board with the notion that there are aspects of git's UX that are terrible. But as a user, if your experience was awful, you would not love the software.

[jchw]

I mean, once you’ve gotten used to a given interface over years and years of practice, it’s obviously going to be a better experience for you. I practically have Git muscle memory at this point, to the point where I frequently type Git commands in Mercurial repositories.

I guess the real point is, just because we, who are experienced with Git, now have a good experience with Git, does that mean Git UX is good? I’d argue no. Bad UX doesn’t usually make software unusable or even unproductive necessarily, in my experience it usually means something more along the lines of, it’s unintuitive and confusing, and takes much more time to learn.

A good example would be something like Blender, especially pre-2.8. Is it bad? No! It’s good software. Is it good from a UX perspective? Well, it has unfamiliar paradigms and it tends to confuse people, so I would say no, and that’s why they’re trying to improve it.

In fairness, Git has done many small things over the years to improve its user experience and to reduce instances of data loss. But Facebook’s chistedit vs rebase -i is a pretty great example of UX differences imo. Git could catch up easily in some of these aspects.

[dllthomas]

"It takes more time to learn" is an important aspect of UX, and as I've said there are clearly ways in which the git UX can be improved.

But having said that, I really feel like the experience of expert users also matters and is often overlooked in discussions of UX. And I just don't think people love software when their experience using it is terrible.