[chefandy]

In many problem spaces, software developers are only happy with interfaces made for software developers. This article diving into the layers of complex logic we can reason about at once perfectly demonstrates why. Developers ‘get’ that complexity, because it’s our job, and think about GUIs as thin convenience wrappers for the program underneath. To most users, the GUI is the software, and they consider applications like appliances for solving specific problems. You aren’t using the refrigerator, you’re getting food. You’re cooking, not using the stove. The fewer things they have to do or think about to solve their problem to their satisfaction, the better. They don’t give a flying fuck about how software does something, probably wouldn’t bother figuring out how to adjust it if they could, and the longer it takes them to figure out how to apply their existing mental models UI idioms to the screen they’re looking at, the more frustrated they get. Software developers know what’s going on behind the scenes so seeing all of the controls and adjustments and statuses and data helps developers orient themselves save figure out what they’re doing. Seeing all that stuff is often a huge hindrance to users that just have a problem they need to solve, and have a much more limited set of mental models and usage idioms they need to use figuring how which of those buttons to press and parameters to adjust. That’s the primary reason FOSS has so few non-technical users.

The problem comes in when people that aren’t UI designers want to make something “look designed” so they start ripping stuff out and moving it around without understanding how it works affect different types of users. I don’t hear too many developers complain about the interface for iMessage for example despite having a fraction of the controls visible at any given time, because it effectively solves their problem, and does so easier than with a visible toggle for read receipts, SMS/iMessages, text size, etc etc etc. It doesn’t merely look designed, it it’s designed for optimal usability.

Developers often see an interface that doesn’t work well for developers usage style, assume that means it doesn’t work well, and then complain about it among other developers creating an echo chamber. Developers being frustrated with an interface is an important data point that shouldn’t be ignored, but our perspectives and preferences aren’t nearly as generalizable some might think.

[terribleperson]

I'm not particularly bothered by non-developer UI. I'm bothered by the incessant application of mobile UI idioms to desktop programs (remember when all windows programs looked somewhat similar?), by UI churn with no purpose, by software that puts functionality five clicks deep for no reason other than to keep the ui 'minimal', by the use of unclear icons when there's room for text (worse, when it's one of the bare handful of things with a universally-understood icon and they decided to invent their own), by UIs that just plain don't present important information for fear of making things 'busy'. There's a lot to get mad about when it comes to modern UIs without needing to approach it from a software developer usage style perspective.

[chefandy]

You're making a lot of assumptions about who's doing what, what problems they're trying to solve by doing it, and why. The discipline of UI design is figuring out how people can solve their problems easily and effectively. If you have advanced users that need to make five mouse clicks to perform an essential function, that's a bad design and the chance of that being a UI design decision is just about zero. Same thing with icons. UI design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication: do you think it's more likely a UI designer-- a professional and likely educated interactivity communicator-- chose those icons, or a developer or project manager grabbing a sexy looking UI mockup on dribble and trying to smash their use case into it?

Minimalism isn't a goal-- it's a tool to make a better interface and can easily be overused. The people that think minimalism is a goal and will chop out essential features to make something "look designed" are almost always developers. Same thing with unclear icons. As someone with a design degree that's done UI design but worked as a back-end developer for a decade before that, and worked as a UNIX admin off and on for a decade before that, I am very familiar with the technical perspective on design and it's various echo-chamber-reinforced follies.

It's not like all UI designers are incredibly qualified or don't underestimate the importance of some particular function within some subset of users, and some people that hire designers don't realize that a graphic designer isn't a UI designer and shouldn't be expected to work as one. But 700 times out of 1000, that's something dev said "this is too annoying to implement" or some project manager dropped it from the timeline. Maybe 250 of those remaining times, the project manager says "we don't need designers for this next set of features, right? Dev can just make it look like the other parts of the project?"

Developers read an edward tufte book, think they're experts, and come up with all sorts of folk explanations about what's happening with a design and why people are doing it, then talk about it in venues like this with a million other developers agreeing with them. That does a whole lot more damage to UIs in the wild than bad design decisions made by designers.

[terribleperson]

You seem to think I'm attacking UI designers. I'm not. I think software would be a lot better with professional UI designers designing UIs.

edit: I am making a lot of assumptions. I'm assuming that most UIs aren't really designed, or are 'designed' from above with directions that are primarily concerned about aesthetics.

[suzzer99]

+1 to all this. And when did it become cool to have icons that provide no feedback they've been clicked, combined with no loading state? I'm always clicking stuff twice now because I'm not sure I even clicked it the first time.

[namaria]

I think a lot of this is bike shedding. Changing the interface design is easy. Understanding usability and building usable systems is hard.

[namaria]

> That’s the primary reason FOSS has so few non-technical users.

Yeah, citation needed. If your argument that 'non-technical users' (whatever that is - being technical is not restricted to understanding computers and software deeply) don't use software that exposes a lot of data on its internals as exemplified by FOSS having few 'non-technical users' meaning people who are not software developers, this is just false. There are entire fields where FOSS software is huge. GIS comes to mind.

[chefandy]

Normally in this rant I specifically note that non-software technical people are still technical. For genuinely non-technical software, what are the most popular end-user facing FOSS-developed applications? Firefox, signal, blender, Inkscape, Krita maybe… most of those are backed by foundations that pay designers and in Mozilla’s case, actually do a ton of open usability research. I don’t believe Inkscape does but they do put a ton of effort into thinking about things from the user workflow perspective and definitely do not present all of the functionality to the user all at once. Blender, at first, just made memorize a shitload of shortcuts but they’ve done a ton of work figuring out what users need to see in which tasks in different workflows and have a ton of different purpose-built views. For decades, Gimp treated design, workflow and UI changes like any other feature and they ended up with a cobbled-together ham fisted interface used almost exclusively by developers. You’ll have a hard time finding a professional photographer that hasn’t tried gimp and an even harder time finding one that still uses it because of the confusing, unfocused interface. When mastodon stood a real chance of being what Bluesky is becoming, I was jumping up and down flailing my arms trying to get people to work on polishing the user flow and figure out how to communicate what they needed to know concisely. Dismissal dismissal dismissal. “I taught my grandmother how federation works! They just need to read the documentation! Once they start using it they’ll figure it out!” Well, they started using it, didn’t have that gifted grandmother-teaching developer to explain it to them, and they almost all left immediately afterwards.

Just like human factors engineering, UI design is a unique discipline that many in the engineering field think they can intuit their way through. They’re wrong and if you look beyond technical people, it’s completely obvious.

[chefandy]

Worth noting that Gimp just made a separate UI design repo and seem to be doing a great job at confronting this systemic problem in the project.