[dkdbejwi383]

Tantacrul who has been working with Muse Score for a while now to improve their UX will also be working on Audacity. They also plan to hire some full time devs.

Source: https://youtu.be/RMWNvwLiXIQ

Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.

[dang]

Discussed here yesterday:

I’m now in charge of Audacity [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995610 - April 2021 (59 comments)

[wexq]

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this.

His twitter (https://twitter.com/Tantacrul) and youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/martinthekearykid) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things.

Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

[throw_m239339]

> OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this.

True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface. I hope someday GIMP team understand that. The software is solid, but the interface isn't great. Some very simple workflow changes made Blender easier to use.

[shawnz]

I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.

[benjaminjackman]

I really just wish GIMP (and Audacity now that I think about it) had a command palette, where I could type in the name of anything found in the menu or assigned to a keyboard shortcut. I don’t use both of them a lot so all of my time is spent search menus for what I am trying to do.

[xahrepap]

If you press the ‘/‘ key you can search the menus. Very useful. I use it all the time now :)

[benjaminjackman]

This looks to be exactly what I was looking for thank you!

[mackrevinack]

oh my god that's amazing. can't believe I'm only finding out about this feature now

[aasasd]

BTW, MacOS has this feature for menus in all apps: at the top of the ‘Help’ menu is a search field. Also invoked with cmd-? (i.e. cmd-shift-/ on my keyboard). The highlighted menu item is then triggered with ‘enter’—so for touch-typists this is way faster than using the mouse.

[chronogram]

If you’re using the applications on Linux you can use HUDs like https://github.com/hardpixel/gnome-hud

[aidenn0]

Does Gimp use the correct api calls for that? I use it, but 90% of GTK apps do not show up.

[robenkleene]

Anyone care to chime in about why Blender seems to have the resources for this kind of work but the GIMP doesn’t?

I know Blender has a lot of corporate sponsorship, so I think the explanation is there’s a “commoditize your complements” effect going on. But does anyone have a more specific hypothesis? E.g., why does Blender have so many complements and the GIMP so few?

[SirSourdough]

I’m not hugely involved in this space so this is just speculation, but my impression is that Blender is relied on by companies more than GIMP. It seems like Photoshop still dominates the space GIMP occupies. So there’s probably just a lot more money being funneled into Blender because a lot more profit depends on it.

[robenkleene]

I was under the impression that Blender at the big studio level was still pretty niche? (E.g., when a studio switches, it’s still a news story.) If you’re aware of places Blender is being used that generate a lot of profit, I’d love to hear about them.

I was under the impression it had more to do with symbiotic relationships between products. E.g., people using Unreal need modeling software (Epic is a sponsor), people using modeling software need GPUs (Nvidia is a sponsor).

[TonyTrapp]

Maybe because there are relatively fewer options for free modeling software, compared to the tons of free 2D graphics programs one can choose from? Putting money into Blender helps those companies getting rid of buggy, expensive 3D software. For 2D graphics, they already have plenty of options.

[robenkleene]

Curious what other free options you mean? Krita, I’m guessing? Other options for raster graphics?

[open0]

I find the UI of recent versions of GIMP to be very nice for the simple image editing / processing that I do.

[mort96]

One thing I don't understand is the move to monochrome icons. I'm really bloody good at recognizing shape+color combinations; the old icons were ugly, but I was able to find the tool I wanted in an instant. After the redesign of the icon pack, I always find myself slowly iterating through every icon in the toolbox to try to find the particular abstract monochrome shape I want.

I think a redesign of the icons was necessary, because the old ones don't look amazing. But you can make tasteful icons which are also colorful and recognizable.

(And I know you can switch icon themes, but when we're talking about UX, we're largely talking about the out-of-the-box experience. 99.9% of users are going to stick with the default icon pack.)

[augustk]

You can still use the old colored icons if you choose Edit -> Preferences -> Icon Theme -> Color.

[shawnz]

I agree the monochrome icons have significant disadvantages. Visual Studio a few years ago made the same attempt at having monochrome icons and there was such pushback that they eventually moved to the current scheme of "monochrome with a splash of colour", which I think is way better.

That said, Photoshop also uses monochrome icons and it can help in some ways to avoid distracting from the image which you are working on. I am not sure what the best compromise would be.

[aasasd]

Franky the new icons are just not too good either. It's possible to have monochrome icons that are memorable and easily recognized—but GIMP's icons aren't that.

[mackrevinack]

i think it would help if they were mostly a vertical list as well. the way they are now you are having to scan left to right but also moving downward as well. even 2 side by side like photoshop does is better since you can mostly just scan downwards

[marrs]

It’s odd that you singled out Gimp as they are the only free software project I’m aware of who engaged a professional UX consultant to redesign their UI, and that must be maybe 15 years ago

[randmeerkat]

Gimp is great, but it’s also the UI that I think of when I think of OSS that lacks finish. Hiring a UX consultant one time, 15 years ago, isn’t how people realize a good user experience. That’s why companies employ UI / UX engineers full time…

[marrs]

He wasn’t hired, he was a part of the development team for a number of years. For all I know, he still is.

I still think you’ve chosen a bad example. Gimp’s UI is no worse than Photoshop’s, and that’s not open source.

[cbozeman]

> True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface.

So this must be what happened... over and over I've heard about people switching to Blender now, even many professionals. I tried it many many years ago and found it, quite honestly, awful.

I guess I should download it again and see how things have changed.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Basically, Blender took a lot of cues from modern UX design so it looks good... and makes the technical bits look good.

[VadimPR]

Where do you get UI/UX people in from?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Learn. That's what I did.

The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman).

For me, it all started with Don Norman's excellent book The Design of Everyday Things[0] (nee The Psychology of Everyday Things).

Reading that book changed the way that I view the world. I can't walk through a door, anymore, without evaluating its affordances and usability.

The challenge (for me) is melding usability and aesthetics. In my experience, designing and implementing a truly usable software interface is hard. It's also highly iterative. A lot of "running things up the flagpole" stuff. I throw out a lot of code, and slaughter a lot of sacred cows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

[Tantacrul]

(Tantacrul Here)

It's true that there often exists a clash between designers and those who champion accessibility standards. IMO, this is normally because the designer in question hasn't enough experience working on software. Speaking for myself? I designed the accessibility features in Paint 3D while at Microsoft. I was in charge of accessibility of another Microsoft Studio that worked on Hololens software.

For MuseScore 4 (currently in development), I have made sure that every bit of UI passes web accessibility contrast standards and I have designed a new 'High Contrast Mode' which is being implemented right now. In addition, myself and another member of the UKAAF (Peter Jonas) have designed a far better focus state / keyboard navigation system into MS4 than MS3 had. This will enable much better screen reader support and will also help with ongoing efforts to introduce Braille support too.

I'm not one of those designers. But I do sympathise with the concern. I see it all the time!

[ulnarkressty]

Big fan of your channel.

You mention in the video that the next steps will involve interviewing users and developers to find out more about the software usability and potential issues / fixes. Could you make this whole process and the results public, such that other OSS can benefit from this kind of usability analysis?

There are indeed many resources out there about this sort of process, but I think it would be great to see an expert long-form explaining how they take the interview results and convert them into actionable goals in order to improve the user experience.

[dash2]

I just started using MuseScore 3.6 and I've gotta say it is surprisingly usable for an open source project. There are some annoyances, like drag-and-drop scrolling the page instead of selecting notes, but overall it becomes intuitive quite quickly. So, if that is your work, then congratulations so far! Looking forward to version 4.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Thanks for your service!

[xbar]

Admirable goals.

[dkdbejwi383]

> The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman)

Which is silly because good UX that works for people with disabilities or impairments also benefits fully able users in the vast majority of cases

[TeMPOraL]

In fact, accessibility is probably the last remaining hope of power users[0].

With general-audience software, the market doesn't care much about the minority that are the serious users, and it's hard to make a convincing argument to business people here. However, accessibility does have a strong enough ethical argument behind it, which is also increasingly being backed by regulations.

Allowing accessibility tools to work with an application involves annotating UI with machine-readable metadata about information displayed and operations available. That makes the interface comprehensible to any external software - including software that could use this information to provide an alternative, more ergonomic frontend, undoing various user-hostile decisions of the original design.

--

[0] - By which I don't mean just computer nerds, but also everyone who uses some bit of software on a regular basis - particularly in context of work.

[JoeDaDude]

For people unfamiliar, this video is a perfect intro to Don Norman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Thanks so much! That's great.

[ridaj]

I would also recommend Emotional Design by the same author. It's a follow-up book that has been very useful for me to understand that great design isn't just usable and accessible, but should also be beautiful, and should respect that what people build using software are not just files on a storage system but often their most personally meaningful things.

[ehutch79]

For a long time nielsen groups webpage was one of the uglier websites on the web in the name of accessibility. That's part of where mistrust of them specifically comes from.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Also, like many pundits, there's a lot of "My way is THE ONE, TRUE WAY" stuff going on; which isn't a particularly good way to make friends.

They have the right idea (I have taken a number of NNG classes, over the years), but they are only one dimension, of a multi-dimensional space, and I have found it to my advantage to take a "hybrid" approach (which means that everyone is pissed at me).

[matkoniecz]

For start, nearly every software would benefit from running small scale UX test.

Take three people who never used given software, ask them to do the most basic tasks. And fix the most common problems.

Your software is much harder to use than you expect.

You do not need UI/UX people, massive scale testing to fix low hanging fruit.

[tclancy]

I think it’s a culture change on the developer side. I was exposed to UI UX about fifteen years ago and worked with a number of terrific designers who put users first. The problem is as devs the job can feel overwhelming enough and then when you get to a point you feel is done, now you have someone telling you you need to redo it. It’s an egoless thing one has to develop and we don’t necessarily encourage that. I think the number of people who get to Beginners Mind as devs is as much Survivorship Bias as anything else.

[wpietri]

Yeah, I think the definition of "done" is a great thing to focus on here. For me, the definition is generally, "works for the user". But waterfall-ish processes encourage developers to think that done means "finished the code". But that's really "finished the code for their first understanding of somebody's first guess at what might solve a user problem".

If something isn't "done" until it has at least survived a first user test, then we don't need to be quite as egoless, because we are a participant in the larger problem-solving process.

I also think your point on being overwhelmed matters a lot. Too many software processes are push-based, where an executive is cramming things in the hopper and insisting on a pace. I like pull-based processes. E.g., having a kanban board with WIP limits, so an individual unit of work takes as long as it takes.

[mxcrossb]

IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.

[matkoniecz]

I think that more accurate would be saying is that OSS is often developed by people already using it and used to weird interface and not benefiting from it being usable by newbies.

So there is much smaller motivation to improve it.

And avoiding change for the sake of change is something that I actually like. One of reasons why I switched to LibreOffice and later to Linux is because I am not fan of relearning interface without a good reason.

-------------

But nearly every software would benefit from running small scale UX test. Take three people, ask them to do the most basic tasks - and fix the most common problems.

Your software is much harder to use than you expect.

[open-source-ux]

Related is this: sometimes you have been using a piece of software for such a long time you can no longer judge whether the user-interface (UI) is any good. You've simply mastered the steps (and keyboard shortcuts) needed to accomplish a task and it now feels "natural", no matter how clunky or clumsy the steps remain.

And there's also a widespread belief among developers that making a task easier in the UI means "dumbing down" the UI. Or that making software easier to use means it could never satisfy "power users".

Developers love to revel in arcane interface minutiae (especially for command-line tools). They think it's equal to acquiring a skill or knowledge. But it's not really. Instead, it is the perpetration of a clumsy method to completing a task. But now that the developer has mastered that method (and that feeling of "knowledge" gained as a consequence), they won't easily let go. Or be easily persuaded of a different method.

[nitrogen]

Instead, it is the perpetration of a clumsy method to completing a task.

Not in every case. For experienced/professional/power users of any software, what matters is maximizing the information density in time of both input and output. Sometimes the best way to do that appears arcane.

I want to be able to accomplish much in as little time as possible, so I want a high temporal input information density. So that might mean using a mouse instead of a trackpad for precise aiming and scrolling, or using keyboard shortcuts instead of on-screen icons. It might mean there are different mouse behaviors for ctrl-drag, middle-click-drag, etc.

I also want to be able to receive as much information about the state of the application as possible in as little time as possible. Too little density and I have to keep more state in my head and spend time jumping around. Too much density and the senses are overwhelmed. This might mean, for a CLI tool, that zero output is the best output in case of success. But for long-running processes that might be a progress bar under a list of log entries. For GUIs, the optimum might mean that there is a lot of information and a lot of actions on screen with reduced whitespace, which seems intimidating at first but is necessary to communicate the state of the system to the user.

So convincing any power user to "let go" is like asking someone to give up their legs for a scooter. Sure, it's simpler to go places in mostly straight lines with a scooter, but linear motion is only one of the many things people do with their legs that justify the arcane UI of unstable bipedal locomotion. We walk along streets, run along trails, jump over obstacles, dance, spar, climb, swim, etc.

This is not to say that scooters have no place, or that every tool is at a global optimum. But any "different method" that someone wants to propose will very deservedly receive pushback if it does not fulfill the full purpose of the old method.

[frosted-flakes]

A good example is the UI of Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, which is not at all intuitive. I was incredibly confused when I first started using them, and it took me a long time to become proficient. But now I've mastered them, the absolute last thing I want is for them to do a UI overhaul.

[bayindirh]

I do not hate when an application I use revamp its UI (e.g. Pixelmator -> Pixelmator Pro). However, developing good UX is as hard as developing robust code and high performance algorithms.

Unless the devs get UX improvement backwards (cough GNOME cough), there's nothing to worry IMHO. OTOH, for a CLI application, backwards compatibility and/or graceful depreciation is key.

[redwall_hp]

Modern "UX" is just a failed premise. It favors hand holding for the novice, which someone won't remain forever, over efficiency and control for the experienced user.

"Old style" interfaces are universally better than tabletized crap, and had as much and higher quality research into the choices behind them. It's not limited to OSS. Apple is a glaring example of that right now. The Mac Human Interface Guidelines and the thought that went into the Mac OS were phenomenal. Contemporary style changes driven by users' familiarity with tabletized (or dare I say "Fischer-Price") UIs are regressions. Visible things become hidden to look "cleaner," keyboard control is ignored, oversized buttons are favored.

[anaerobicover]

Much of OSS UI/UX however does not follow such excellent guidelines, but is rather a kitchen sink, and that does not in truth well serve either power users nor novice. As you are suggesting, the design must have thoughtful work applied.

[mofosyne]

Is there perhaps a way to make difficulty level selection sliders like you see in games but for these tools?

[PicassoCTs]

I love those blender tutorial videos, were they dont even bother to tell you were in the menue the button is for something, and instead go "press key x y z" - though 2.8 has greatly improved the whole affair.

This should in theory allow for a complete redesign of the gui though, as the core audience uses shortkeys anyway.

[e3bc54b2]

Its also from the facts that almost every "redesign" or presentation for one, is often full regression in use ability terms.

It does help when software users that happen to have good UI chops suggest redesign because then it often improves things, as I've seen happen with KDE and Budgie, at least. But pulling in UX "designers" who have no skin in the game and letting them play around is how you get ridiculous unusable crap like Google Pay, Apple Music, Windows 8, whatever Google is calling their Android UI now, and more.

[wexq]

Agreed here.

And also the attitude of "works for me" really pushes usability people out.

[smolder]

I think a good approach sometimes is to decouple UI from other things as much as possible, then make "classic" UI optional for the people who value that while the improvements are worked on separately. It depends on the project if that just ends up being too much of a hassle or not.

[endemic]

What I find difficult is the lack of communication. Programming UI changes is hard work, and when a developer isn’t convinced of the benefit to users, it makes it seem like the change is being made for the ego of the UX designer.

[goodmachine]

Thank you for the Sibelius video link. It's very good indeed.

The thing is (unmentioned in Tantacrul's Audacity video) is that Audacity's UI has always - from day one - been a terrible copy of the much beloved SoundEdit16, afaict. I just want something as easy to use as SoundEdit was, if Tantacrul is reading.

[pastelsky]

I wish so too! Being a UI/UX person who has an eye for good design, I'd love to contribute to OSS projects.

I think a lot more OSS projects should reach out for contributions in improving usability — it's almost always what separates OSS projects from paid alternatives.