>Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly There is a high level of subjectivity in al

>Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly There is a high level of subjectivity in all these, especially user-friendliness. Polish, you can quantify with stuff like alignment, consistency etc., but for user-friendliness, I find most modern UIs, including elementary or gnome, to be quite hostile. You can stare at pretty icons and parallel and perpendicular lines all day, but how do you get shit done ? That's what most modern designs miss. And it's not just these poor OSS projects. Look at all the random apple inspired navigation changes that google added to their basic navigation in pixel 3, which you can't even change although the old code exists in aosp. TLDR: user friendliness is very hard to get right.