[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.

[shawnz]

I'm not sure the answer to your question specifically, but somewhat related is that GIMP invented GTK. (GTK formerly stood for GIMP toolkit)

[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).

[nicoburns]

My understanding is while Blender is not the market leader, it does have significant market share, and significant corporate funding. OTOH, commericial usage of GIMP is pretty much nothing.

[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?

[MikeTheGreat]

I was able to use Paint.Net in place of GIMP. Paint.Net is Windows-only but it handled pretty much all my raster image editing needs and unlike GIMP I can actually remember how to use it despite only using it every couple of months.

[TonyTrapp]

I didn't just mean free options. There are still many other acceptably-priced and acceptably-licensed graphics programs besides PhotoShop. These may still be more acceptable than buying into the PhotoShop ecosystem. With 3D software, it's not so simple.

[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.

[mort96]

I know. You might've missed this part:

> (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]

I agree, for me it wasn't obvious that the icon theme can be changed.

[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.

[exikyut]

I'd add to this the thought of supporting a dumping-ground approach where people can throw suggestions, rants, complaints etc "over the wall" into a giant wiki/knowledgebase or bug tracker type environment that accepts OC submissions or just links to external discussions or sources of insight.

Hmm. Now I'm wondering whether such a thing should be run for a finite period, or left open to track improvement over time. Perhaps the system could be cyclic, with "calls for feedback" that would require re-submission into each cycle. This would have the advantage of effectively auto-closing all unfinished work after feedback invitations, but the disadvantage of frustrating repeat submitters of issues that generally don't get prioritized. ...You know what, there are probably good established ways of doing this, Microsoft probably knows this stuff backwards, and the Blender foundation seem to have a good feedback thing going so they probably know a thing or two as well.

Regardless of how it's done, spreading the fact that it is being done far and wide is IMO crucial (eg, getting this onto as many OSS/tech news sites as possible) - and I also think that the _worse_ the signal/noise ratio, the better, as I reckon this would be a good indicator that the long tail of the interesting really-edge cases are effectively being captured!

[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.

[meowface]

If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng

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

[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.

[the_other]

In web apps, you can short-circuit this “there’s no business case” nonsense a bit by building your components using the accessibility attributes as the hooks between HTML, JS & CSS. E.G. rather than adding classes for everything you want JS and CSS to act on, instead hook onto the attributes role, aria-*, hidden and so on. If you do it as habit, it takes only a little bit longer to think about or type than attaching a class name, but helps you use the browser’s built-in accessibility support “for free”. If you work this way, you don’t even need to tell management what you’re doing.

I accept that this is easier on smaller, or new projects.

[mort96]

100% agree. I've noticed this as well. A lot of the time, the best objective-sounding argument for something I want is "it's necessary for accessibility", even though _I_ want it for reasons which would've been ignored. And a whole lot of the settings I rely on to make my computing devices comfortable are hidden under "accessibility" menus in settings screens.

There are even cases where the strongest argument for something to have a web version in addition to an Android/iOS app is accessibility. You can make some really interesting and specialized input hardware for Windows PCs which has no chance of working on an iPad, so there are people whose disabilities makes web apps way easier to use than any Android/iOS app. And if there exists a web app, power users can use the service from their comfortable desktop setup rather than from the tiny screen on their phone.

Accessibility is the most effective argument against the "one-size-fits-all" "it works for 90% of users" thinking that's otherwise so pervasive.

[the_other]

> make my computing devices comfortable are hidden under "accessibility" menus in settings screens.

That IS accessibility.

[krrrh]

One of the first things I do on a new Mac is to enable three finger drag. A couple of years ago this option moved fron trackpad settings to accessibility options.

That’s when I understood that I had a disability.

[dkdbejwi383]

I can't understand why Apple did this, it seems like such a natural interaction for the trackpad.

[mackrevinack]

yea when i was using windows a few years back i got some great mileage out of autohotkey + microsoft's accessibility access. (acc.ahk is the script someone make that interfaces with it if anyone is interested)

one good example was being able to control spotify. it doesn't work with the current redesign i don't think, but i used to be able to heart a song, show the current track name and artist in a tooltip, or list all the songs in your friends tab. lots of handy stuff like that and it all worked even when the spotify window was in the background

[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.