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> and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box. You are confusing beginner friendly with user friendly. User friendly UIs a

by tjoff 8y ago

> and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box. You are confusing beginner friendly with user friendly. User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. That said, I can not name a single application that has a better user interface than Blender. It is a masterpiece and I am in complete awe of whatever process and the people that created it.

iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
Could you please identify the difference between beginner friendly and user friendly for me? I’m not convinced that there is one.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  As in, you've never heard of it and suspect they've just made it up, or you're aware of the concept but have an unorthodox opinion about it? It's a very pervasive concept among UX people. If the former, try googling "learnability vs usability" or somesuch?
- fao_ 8y ago
  "User Friendly" depends on the type of tasks that the user intends to accomplish, and the frequency of those tasks. The things that expert users intend to do are not necessarily the same things that beginner users intend to do. Essentially it is about the path-of-resistance between you and your goal. A beginner friendly UI might do X, Y, and Z. But complex tasks like scheduling X, Y, and Z, automating them based on other events, or even performing them rapidly in sequence, are likely to be given a higher path of resistance.
- andybak 8y ago
  The key term to search for is "discoverabilty" although there are other important factors at play
- jolmg 8y ago
  I think vim is user friendly but beginner unfriendly. For whatever task I want to do with text, vim will provide the easiest way to achieve it. However, to anyone that is not experienced with it, it will be the hardest way to achieve it. To put another way, it probably takes a couple minutes to learn and be proficient in windows notepad, and a couple months to learn and be proficient in vim. However, for a task that may take a couple months in notepad, it might take a couple of minutes in vim. I take beginner-friendly to be a more specific form of user-friendlyness. The usefulness of the concept is that it's common to see a UX and say it's not user-friendly, because it's not beginner-friendly. However, not all users are beginners. To someone that is proficient in both vim and notepad, vim is more user-friendly than notepad, because it is more friendly to him, the user, since it allows the completion of any task far easier.
viraptor 8y ago
> User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. You don't have to choose one or the other, it just takes time to make it right for both. Word is a good example example. You want to type some text? It's easy. You want to format it? Click the icons that look relevant. You do it often? Keyboard shortcuts are available for everything. You want to do typesetting? Styles are available, but not enforced. You want to automate things? Integrated programming environment is waiting for you. And almost every action has its own page in the manual. Simple things are simple, tooltips and icons provide discoverability, and you can head to the manual for expert content. This is totally not how blender pre-2.8 works where the discoverability almost doesn't exist.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  Most of what you just said about Word (tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, icons, programming environment) is also true of Blender. But I don't really know what the equivalent of "just type some text" would be in Blender.
  - viraptor 8y ago
    Blender has the shortcuts and programming environment, but lacked the icons/tooltips in many cases. Many existing tooltips listed only what the button mapped to in the python environment.
    - Joeboy 8y ago
      Looking at Blender 2.79 right now, a comfortable 90% of icons, buttons etc have tooltips with useful (if terse) text. Some buttons are text instead of icons, but that's also true of Word. I don't doubt Word is more discoverable, partly because of Microsoft's resources and partly because word processing is fundamentally more accessible than 3D modelling. But by the metrics you're talking about, Blender is maybe 75-90% as good. Which I don't think is the same as "discoverability almost doesn't exist".
      - 8y ago

by tjoff 8y ago

iovrthoughtthis 8y ago

Could you please identify the difference between beginner friendly and user friendly for me? I’m not convinced that there is one.

Joeboy 8y ago
As in, you've never heard of it and suspect they've just made it up, or you're aware of the concept but have an unorthodox opinion about it? It's a very pervasive concept among UX people. If the former, try googling "learnability vs usability" or somesuch?
fao_ 8y ago
"User Friendly" depends on the type of tasks that the user intends to accomplish, and the frequency of those tasks. The things that expert users intend to do are not necessarily the same things that beginner users intend to do. Essentially it is about the path-of-resistance between you and your goal. A beginner friendly UI might do X, Y, and Z. But complex tasks like scheduling X, Y, and Z, automating them based on other events, or even performing them rapidly in sequence, are likely to be given a higher path of resistance.
andybak 8y ago
The key term to search for is "discoverabilty" although there are other important factors at play
jolmg 8y ago
I think vim is user friendly but beginner unfriendly. For whatever task I want to do with text, vim will provide the easiest way to achieve it. However, to anyone that is not experienced with it, it will be the hardest way to achieve it. To put another way, it probably takes a couple minutes to learn and be proficient in windows notepad, and a couple months to learn and be proficient in vim. However, for a task that may take a couple months in notepad, it might take a couple of minutes in vim. I take beginner-friendly to be a more specific form of user-friendlyness. The usefulness of the concept is that it's common to see a UX and say it's not user-friendly, because it's not beginner-friendly. However, not all users are beginners. To someone that is proficient in both vim and notepad, vim is more user-friendly than notepad, because it is more friendly to him, the user, since it allows the completion of any task far easier.

viraptor 8y ago

> User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve. You don't have to choose one or the other, it just takes time to make it right for both. Word is a good example example. You want to type some text? It's easy. You want to format it? Click the icons that look relevant. You do it often? Keyboard shortcuts are available for everything. You want to do typesetting? Styles are available, but not enforced. You want to automate things? Integrated programming environment is waiting for you. And almost every action has its own page in the manual. Simple things are simple, tooltips and icons provide discoverability, and you can head to the manual for expert content. This is totally not how blender pre-2.8 works where the discoverability almost doesn't exist.

Joeboy 8y ago
Most of what you just said about Word (tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, icons, programming environment) is also true of Blender. But I don't really know what the equivalent of "just type some text" would be in Blender.
- viraptor 8y ago
  Blender has the shortcuts and programming environment, but lacked the icons/tooltips in many cases. Many existing tooltips listed only what the button mapped to in the python environment.
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    Looking at Blender 2.79 right now, a comfortable 90% of icons, buttons etc have tooltips with useful (if terse) text. Some buttons are text instead of icons, but that's also true of Word. I don't doubt Word is more discoverable, partly because of Microsoft's resources and partly because word processing is fundamentally more accessible than 3D modelling. But by the metrics you're talking about, Blender is maybe 75-90% as good. Which I don't think is the same as "discoverability almost doesn't exist".
    - 8y ago