[ungamedplayer]

> FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers .

And here lies the rub. I have tried soliciting help in the past . Most ui UX ppl only want to work on successful projects, but successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people.

[chefandy]

A) If you surveyed the same number of developers to contribute to the project and they said no, would you make the same inference about all developers? I think you're assuming more than you realize.

B) The number of successful FOSS projects with interfaces good enough for people who don't have a working mental model of the way software operates is vanishingly small. Firefox... though they actually have a formidable team of designers. Inkscape I'd say. But almost every successful FOSS project caught hold in the technical community, and no further. Sometimes it's barely good enough for that... I mean hell... look at Eclipse. Compare its features on paper to what you get in commercial editors and then see how many developers use it voluntarily.

C) One thing few developers understand about interface design is that adding features here and there to make things better doesn't really work like it does with, say, an API. It involves analysis, talking to people who use the software, coming up with a strategy, and implementing that strategy. Usually that strategy isn't the sort of thing you can implement piecemeal, which is why most significant UI updates today involve making a completely new design, and letting users enable the entire thing as they see fit.

[ungamedplayer]

> If you surveyed the same number of developers to contribute to the project and they said no, would you make the same inference about all developers? I think

This was not an assumption. You are stating a fact. I simply can't find as many UI UX ppl who are willing to work on open source..

Those I have asked reply with the answer above.

I don't know what b and c have to do with what I said though.

[asoneth]

Not the commenter you replied to, but B seems in response to your comment that "Most ui UX ppl only want to work on successful projects". They are pointing out that even successful projects don't appear to have enough design, so the problem may not just be that successful projects are soaking up available designers.

As a professional UX designer/researcher I've found that option C is pretty common. I'll file tickets for egregious usability issues with trivial fixes, but if an interface needs to be rethought from the ground up it's not worth getting involved.

[chefandy]

> And here lies the rub. I have tried soliciting help in the past . Most ui UX ppl only want to work on successful projects, but successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people.

Firstly, are you saying that your initial statement was solely about your own experience and not intended as a statement about designers in general? Because when you say things like "Most ui UX ppl only want to" preceeded by "I have tried soliciting help in the past" I'm not really sure how you'd expect anyone else to reach that conclusion.

> successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people

Yes, they do. Even most successful independent FOSS projects have dumpster fire UI/UX. I can't think of a single one that isn't funded and professionally managed with paid designers that has an interface or overall flow/experience that doesn't need serious design intervention. If there's an independent, volunteer-only FOSS project with functioning all-around UX that's attracting all of the design talent willing to put up with the hassle, I sure haven't seen it-- hence point b.

Indeed, point C was not a direct response to anything you said. It was a continuation of point B which described how a designer would need to be involved in a project to offer substantial contributions, and that is very clearly not the case even with many successful FOSS projects.

[cchance]

This is what i kinda figured to be the case, UI/UX and generally artists don't seem to participate in projects as much for free or for projects that aren't already successful where they'll get some publicity out of especially on the art side of things.

[chefandy]

And this is one of the big problems... not what you're talking about, but your understanding of what we do.

'Art' and UI/UX design are as different as fiction writers and technical writing. Someone might be good at both, but they're definitely not the same thing. Interfaces are a communication medium, and reasoning about the best way to communicate something is a process that often doesn't even touch aesthetics. These types of designers working for larger companies probably don't even get invited to the meetings where aesthetic decisions get made, and they definitely don't work for the art director who'd be involved in that.

The first step is figuring out what problems your users are trying to solve, and the next step is working with them to figure out the most effective way to do that. It's pretty pointless when the users are insanely defensive about the status quo, as is the case in most FOSS projects.

[asoneth]

Many UX/UI design folks I know have unpaid side projects, they're just not FOSS.

Nonprofit org websites, event posters, flyers, t-shirts, illustrations, small utility apps, WordPress themes, unsolicited redesigns of well-known applications on Dribble, etc.

I spend my days convincing developers to make UI changes. Spending my nights and weekends doing the same thing but with even less authority does not sound like fun.

[chefandy]

I know lots of design folks that contribute to FOSS projects-- they just contribute as developers. The "unicorn" moniker for hybrid designers/developers is bullshit. You might not get a designer that's going to rewrite your embedded system firmware, but I'm a college-trained designer that was a full time web developer for 10 years.

None of the other designers + experienced coders I know contributes design to FOSS projects because the process is just so miserable. You constantly have to justify the very basic value of design contributions only to have it rejected, or completely chopped up by someone else who has no understanding of what you conceptually contributed. It's completely demoralizing.

And as a long-time developer, I get the frustration with design. Sometimes design choices seem completely arbitrary or superfluous to developers... though the root of that is developers often a) assume they know enough about design to critique it, and b) assume that design is purely aesthetic when UI/UX designers often don't even consider aesthetic concerns even if they have related training-- it's all about workflows, telling users what they need to know to solve their problems while keeping the cognitive and visual load low enough to not slow them down, and giving them the appropriate controls to do what they need to do. If your crowd is developers, then the interfaces might even look like what the developers would make-- their mental model essentially equates the GUI to a thin wrapper around a back-end API which actually does the work. To the 95% of other potential users, the interface is the tool. Interfaces are all about communication, and much the same way technical writers are way better at making end-user tutorials than developers are, designers are way better at figuring out how to communicate functionality, intent, and information to non-technical users.

[asoneth]

Now that you mention it, I do know a couple designers who do FOSS development but I doubt they would be interested in doing design or research for someone else's project.

As someone who also jumped from development to design I agree with your description of the friction between developers and designers.

I'll also add that compromise is especially difficult when everyone involved is a volunteer, many of whom seem to be attracted to FOSS partly to reclaim some of the autonomy missing from their day jobs. And when projects become popular many maintainers are petrified of making hard choices that might anger existing users.

Given that, it's not surprising how many FOSS projects fall back to tinkering with icons and colors but otherwise recreate workflows from proprietary competitors.

[CharlesW]

> …successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people.

Is GIMP the exception that proves the rule?

[denton-scratch]

Is your point that GIMP is not successful; or that it is successful, despite lacking ux/UI people?

[chefandy]

A couple I'm friends with had a broken kitchen faucet handle for ages-- it would just fall off unless you held it on while operating the faucet. Unfortunately, one of the necessary connector pieces was no longer available, so it wasn't a trivial fix. Once, when I was pet sitting their rabbits, I got so annoyed by the thing that I went home and made a wooden piece to fit in where the missing part went, and fixed it while they were still on vacation. It was supposed to be a surprise but I totally forgot about it, and a few months later my wife said to them "hey do you like having your kitchen faucet fixed?" They looked at her, perplexed, walked over to the kitchen faucet, tried to pull it off, and it obviously didn't come off. They were shocked! Why? Because they were so used to holding that damned handle on the faucet that it just became an part of their using that faucet.

Similarly, people get used to bad interfaces. While we are always going to be most productive using interfaces that we're used to, that often mistakenly leads them to believe that they're objectively good. If you ask nearly any group of professional photographers how many hate Adobe, most will raise their hands. Ask them how many have used Gimp, they'll almost all raise their hand. If you ask them how many used Gimp more than once, they'll almost all lower them. Ask them why, and they will almost guaranteed cite the poor interface. While many dedicated and experienced FOSS developers (which I am) will cite Adobe's marketing practices as the reason people use Photoshop instead of Gimp, I call bullshit. You'll find many more photographers using Affinity Photo than Gimp, and considering Gimp is free, that says a lot. Who will you find using Gimp? Developers that need a photo editor. Why? They're so used to holding on the faucet that they don't even recognize when they see a properly working one. (And they'll often get really mad for even implying it needs to be fixed.) You also don't see that split with Inkscape. Most people who professionally work with vector art choose Illustrator as their primary tool, but most of them cite exactly the reasons developers assume people continue to use photoshop: overall smoothness, ecosystem integration, file type compatibility, etc. There are some legitimate shortcomings in Inkscape-- the type tools are just not as good which matters for graphic designers, for example. But lots of people who do vector art professionally do use inkscape.

[CharlesW]

The latter: Some technical people seem to love it, but it’s real hard to love if you come from mainstream tools.