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Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I

Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!" Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way, what's going on here? Why aren't we in control of this?

jimmaswell 7y ago
You can change the UI skin in the options. I've been using GIMP for years and I don't have any major complaints.
- xg15 7y ago
  This is about usability, so I don't think referring to a setting buried in the options (that you have to know about first) is a valid point. > I've been using GIMP for years I think usability to users experienced in the software and to new users are two different things. I believe an important part of usability is discoverability which is probably better judged by new users than by experienced users.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  sure, you can make the icon bar more sensible with some effort, but not as sensible as it was in 1998: https://scorpioncity.com/images/linux/shotgimp.png https://scorpioncity.com/images/linux/shotgimp.png
- sbierwagen 7y ago
  >You can change the UI skin in the options. Holy cow! There's even the "classic" theme right there. Wish I knew this a year ago.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Yup. Edit -> Preferences -> UI -> Icons -> Legacy. Done.
loopz 7y ago
Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors. It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock. We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad". Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad". Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to the other people in the waiting room to democratically decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is important.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    The uninformed public is pretty vocal about what is going on in most apps. The UX propellerheads come back with statistics from user telemetry that always agree with them. UX is the problem — designing “experiences” geared around an 80/20 approach is substituted for the harder task of building tools that work.
  - rapind 7y ago
    Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.
    - kristopolous 7y ago
akeck 7y ago
I'm dating myself, but I really liked late 90s GIMP, where almost everything was available via right click menu. GIMP was simpler then, though.
sergiotapia 7y ago
I thought you were exaggerating but holy moly it's 100% true. What happened? search for images: "gimp 1.0" vs "gimp 2020". Wow.
- necovek 7y ago
  Hah, I see that I'll be in for a surprise myself once I upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.
micmil 7y ago
And if you actually USED late 90's Gimp you'd know that there are so few buttons because there weren't actually any tools. Gimp was a complete joke and so feature-incomplete compared to Photosop, Paintshop, Corel Draw, or anything else that the only people that used it were literally too damn poor to afford other software or too ideologically driven to ever use closed source. And what do you mean by "why aren't we in control of this?" "WE" are. Just download the source and fix it to your liking. Problem solved! It's open source!
hiram112 7y ago
GIMP has had no much powerful functionality while at the same time having an absolute awful UI going on 15 years or more now. And it still hasn't been fixed. I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users. There is obviously a large potential market for a lower cost option for light users of Photoshop who don't want a monthly subscription to Creative Cloud. Maybe they secretly paid off open source devs to obfuscate the code so much that any potential volunteers would have too much trouble finding a way to re-architect the UI without years of unpaid work. When I see so many great improvements to complex software released to the community on GitHub, along with the potential for some startup to fork GIMP, fix its UI, and charge some sort of support fee like a lot of companies do with OSS, I just find it very strange that GIMP's UI is still in such bad shape, after two decades oconatant complaining by users. It wouldn't surprise if Microsoft did or does something similar with the OpenOffice code base. So many compatibility and usability problems that just seem to langusish for decades, while you'd think some company could find a way to make money fixing some of the biggest issues keeping light users of Office 365 who don't want to pay subscriptions.
- lmm 7y ago
  Good designers don't work for free. It's kind of strange that programmers have a culture of working for free (or at least of employers agreeing to open-source contributions), but we do, so gnarly algorithms get open-sourced all the time.
  - pmontra 7y ago
    We developers write something for free because we need it. Even if we build something awful we still use it and maybe open source it. Then maybe we improve the UI but it's not our job so we're not good at it. A designer that can't code will never start a software project so I guess that it's uncommon for them to get involved in one for free. Then there are developers and designers involved in open source because their companies pay them for that. Gnome's designers are listed at https://wiki.gnome.org/Design#Team_Members https://wiki.gnome.org/Design#Team_Members Two of them work at Red Hat, one at Purism, I didn't find any immediate affiliation for the other two.
fiblye 7y ago
What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me. Loads of other people share this complaint. With every new release, there are people recommending giving it a second/third/fifty-third shot saying "They finally made it easy to use this time!" At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century.
- hilbert42 7y ago
  "What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me." You're not wrong, I wish you were but you're not. By any measure GIMP is a dog of a program. I wish it weren't so as I stopped upgrading my various Adobe products some years ago, but alas it is. It would take me as long as this 'The Decline of Usability' essay to give an authoritative explanation but I'll attempt to illustrate with a few examples: 1. The way the controls work is awkward, increasing or decreasing say 'saturation' is not as intuitive as it is in Photoshop and the dynamics (increase/decrease etc.) just isn't as smooth as it ought to be. Sliders stick and don't respond immediately which is very distracting when you're trying to watch some attribute in your picture trend one way or other. 2. Most previews are unacceptably slow; they really are a pain to use. 3. The latest versions have the 'Fade' function removed altogether. I use 'Fade' all the time and I don't like being told by some arrogant GIMP programmer that the "function never worked properly in the first place, and anyway you should use the proper/correct XYZ method". You see this type of shitty arrogance from programmers all the time[1]. 4. GIMP won't let you set your favourite image format as your default type; you're forced to GIMP's own XCF format and then export your image into say your required .JPG format from there. (I understand the reason for this but there ought to be an option to override it, if the GIMP developers were smart they'd provide options for various times, for instance: 'session only'.) 5. As others have mentioned, there's icon and menu issues, menu items aren't arranged logically or consistently. Essentially, the GIMP's operational ergonomics are terrible and there's been precious little effort from GIMP's developers to correct it. (GIMP's so tedious to use I still use my ancient copy of Photoshop for most of the work, I only then use the GIMP to do some special function that's not in Photoshop.) [1] The trouble is most programmers program for themselves—not end users, so they don't see any reason to think like end users do. (I said almost the same thing several days ago in my response to Microsoft's enforcing single spaces between sentences in MS Office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858129 .) It doesn't seem to matter whether it's commercial software such as Microsoft's Office, or open software such as the GIMP or LibreOffice, etc., they do things their way, not the way users want or are already familiar with. Commercial software is often tempered by commercial reality (keeping compatibility etc.) but even then that's not always so (take Windows Metro UI or Windows 10 for instance, any reasonable user would have to agree they're first-class stuff-ups). That said, GIMP is about the worst out there. "At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century." Right again! GIMP developers seem not only to be hostile towards ordinary users but there's been along-standing bloody mindedness among them that's persisted for decades; effectively it is to not even consider ordinary users within their schema. Nothing says this better than the lack of information about future versions, milestones, etc. All we ever get are vague comments that don't change much from one decade to the next. Perhaps it would be best for all concerned if GIMP's developers actually embedded this message in its installation program: "GIMP is our play toy—it's prototype software for our own use and experimenting—it's NOT for normal user use. You may use it as is but please do not expect it to work like other imaging software and do not bother us with feedback for we'll just ignore you. You have been warned".
bootlooped 7y ago
I have only used GIMP a handful of times in my life. I recently had to download it to do something beyond MS Paint's abilities. I had a hard time understanding why many things behaved the way they did. I don't remember it being this hard the last time I used it.
- necovek 7y ago
  Whenever UI/UX is brought up, GIMP inevitably enters the discussion. I've used it a number of times and do not find it any harder than any other piece of software — doing complex operations where you are not sure what you want to do (or especially, how is that called) is hard, but that's hard in an IDE as well. I do not do much, but I do not do little with it either — I am perfectly happy with layers, selection tools, simple painting tools and the rudimentary colour correction I may want to do. And one can claim that the hamburger-menu-like approach started with Gimp, fwiw (right click on your image to get to a full menu, though you still had that menu at the top of your image window). Two things have always been a requirement for proper Gimp use: "virtual desktops" — a dedicated one for Gimp — and IMO, "sloppy focus" (window under the pointer gets the focus right away), but I've been using those since at least 2001 or something when I first saw them on Sun workstations, so I probably never had trouble with extra clicks required to focus between toolbars and other dialogs. For creating original artwork, I find any graphical approach too limiting — I _do_ want an easy approach of UIs, but I frequently think in terms of proportions and spatial relationships when drawing ("I want this to be roughly twice the size of this other thing and to the left") — I always try to imagine this combined tool that would fit my workflow, but then I remember that I am probably an outlier: I may have been spoiled having done mathematical drawings as a primary schooler in Metafont and later Metapost (for colour, or rather, grayscale :)), and being a developer since 7th grade, where it's hard for you to come to grips with how suboptimal doing precise drawings in any software is (I've done some minor uni work in AutoCAD too).
nine_k 7y ago
I must be the rare person here who finds that Gimp becomes better and nicer with each release. Yes, I had to explicitly set the way I want the icons to look in settings. It wasn't hard, and one of the bundled sets worked for me. Maybe it's because I'm a long-time user and I know my way around, and where in the settings to look. One of the problems of shipping UIs is setting good defaults. Maybe Gimp does not do a great job here; I should try a Clea installation.
brabel 7y ago
Gimp is probably the only software I use somewhat regularly in which I can absolutely never figure out how to do something new, and if I don't do something for more than a month, I have to google again for how to do it. The level of stupidity in its design surely deserves a reward for unusability.
kebman 7y ago
Long time Adobe user. I tried Gimp. Shut it down, and merrily went back to my Adobe subscription plan.
- lisphead 7y ago
  Long time emacs user. I tried vim. Shut it down, and merrily went back to my motor memory.
- mcswell 7y ago
  I haven't used Gimp in perhaps a decade, but I can't imagine a worse UI than Adobe. At home, I have a free PDF reader, but at work (...when I was going to work...), I had to use Adobe's PDF editor. (Not that I edit the PDFs, I mostly just read them; occasionally a highlighter would be nice.) Ugly huge icons that I don't need and which take up lots of space. And next to nothing in the menu, except ways to turn on icon bars at the top and/or side, hopelessly emsmallening the page I actually want to read.
Joeboy 7y ago
> Apparently almost everyone agrees I very much do not. Gimp used to be horrendous to use. It still has some usability issues, but it's become something I can use without risking my mental health.

jimmaswell 7y ago

You can change the UI skin in the options. I've been using GIMP for years and I don't have any major complaints.

xg15 7y ago
This is about usability, so I don't think referring to a setting buried in the options (that you have to know about first) is a valid point. > I've been using GIMP for years I think usability to users experienced in the software and to new users are two different things. I believe an important part of usability is discoverability which is probably better judged by new users than by experienced users.
kristopolous 7y ago
sure, you can make the icon bar more sensible with some effort, but not as sensible as it was in 1998: https://scorpioncity.com/images/linux/shotgimp.png https://scorpioncity.com/images/linux/shotgimp.png
sbierwagen 7y ago
>You can change the UI skin in the options. Holy cow! There's even the "classic" theme right there. Wish I knew this a year ago.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Yup. Edit -> Preferences -> UI -> Icons -> Legacy. Done.

loopz 7y ago

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

kristopolous 7y ago
It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors. It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock. We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad". Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad". Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to the other people in the waiting room to democratically decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is important.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  The uninformed public is pretty vocal about what is going on in most apps. The UX propellerheads come back with statistics from user telemetry that always agree with them. UX is the problem — designing “experiences” geared around an 80/20 approach is substituted for the harder task of building tools that work.
- rapind 7y ago
  Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.
  - kristopolous 7y ago

akeck 7y ago

I'm dating myself, but I really liked late 90s GIMP, where almost everything was available via right click menu. GIMP was simpler then, though.

sergiotapia 7y ago

I thought you were exaggerating but holy moly it's 100% true. What happened? search for images: "gimp 1.0" vs "gimp 2020". Wow.

necovek 7y ago
Hah, I see that I'll be in for a surprise myself once I upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.

micmil 7y ago

And if you actually USED late 90's Gimp you'd know that there are so few buttons because there weren't actually any tools. Gimp was a complete joke and so feature-incomplete compared to Photosop, Paintshop, Corel Draw, or anything else that the only people that used it were literally too damn poor to afford other software or too ideologically driven to ever use closed source. And what do you mean by "why aren't we in control of this?" "WE" are. Just download the source and fix it to your liking. Problem solved! It's open source!

hiram112 7y ago

GIMP has had no much powerful functionality while at the same time having an absolute awful UI going on 15 years or more now. And it still hasn't been fixed. I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users. There is obviously a large potential market for a lower cost option for light users of Photoshop who don't want a monthly subscription to Creative Cloud. Maybe they secretly paid off open source devs to obfuscate the code so much that any potential volunteers would have too much trouble finding a way to re-architect the UI without years of unpaid work. When I see so many great improvements to complex software released to the community on GitHub, along with the potential for some startup to fork GIMP, fix its UI, and charge some sort of support fee like a lot of companies do with OSS, I just find it very strange that GIMP's UI is still in such bad shape, after two decades oconatant complaining by users. It wouldn't surprise if Microsoft did or does something similar with the OpenOffice code base. So many compatibility and usability problems that just seem to langusish for decades, while you'd think some company could find a way to make money fixing some of the biggest issues keeping light users of Office 365 who don't want to pay subscriptions.

lmm 7y ago
Good designers don't work for free. It's kind of strange that programmers have a culture of working for free (or at least of employers agreeing to open-source contributions), but we do, so gnarly algorithms get open-sourced all the time.
- pmontra 7y ago
  We developers write something for free because we need it. Even if we build something awful we still use it and maybe open source it. Then maybe we improve the UI but it's not our job so we're not good at it. A designer that can't code will never start a software project so I guess that it's uncommon for them to get involved in one for free. Then there are developers and designers involved in open source because their companies pay them for that. Gnome's designers are listed at https://wiki.gnome.org/Design#Team_Members https://wiki.gnome.org/Design#Team_Members Two of them work at Red Hat, one at Purism, I didn't find any immediate affiliation for the other two.

fiblye 7y ago

What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me. Loads of other people share this complaint. With every new release, there are people recommending giving it a second/third/fifty-third shot saying "They finally made it easy to use this time!" At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century.

hilbert42 7y ago
"What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me." You're not wrong, I wish you were but you're not. By any measure GIMP is a dog of a program. I wish it weren't so as I stopped upgrading my various Adobe products some years ago, but alas it is. It would take me as long as this 'The Decline of Usability' essay to give an authoritative explanation but I'll attempt to illustrate with a few examples: 1. The way the controls work is awkward, increasing or decreasing say 'saturation' is not as intuitive as it is in Photoshop and the dynamics (increase/decrease etc.) just isn't as smooth as it ought to be. Sliders stick and don't respond immediately which is very distracting when you're trying to watch some attribute in your picture trend one way or other. 2. Most previews are unacceptably slow; they really are a pain to use. 3. The latest versions have the 'Fade' function removed altogether. I use 'Fade' all the time and I don't like being told by some arrogant GIMP programmer that the "function never worked properly in the first place, and anyway you should use the proper/correct XYZ method". You see this type of shitty arrogance from programmers all the time[1]. 4. GIMP won't let you set your favourite image format as your default type; you're forced to GIMP's own XCF format and then export your image into say your required .JPG format from there. (I understand the reason for this but there ought to be an option to override it, if the GIMP developers were smart they'd provide options for various times, for instance: 'session only'.) 5. As others have mentioned, there's icon and menu issues, menu items aren't arranged logically or consistently. Essentially, the GIMP's operational ergonomics are terrible and there's been precious little effort from GIMP's developers to correct it. (GIMP's so tedious to use I still use my ancient copy of Photoshop for most of the work, I only then use the GIMP to do some special function that's not in Photoshop.) [1] The trouble is most programmers program for themselves—not end users, so they don't see any reason to think like end users do. (I said almost the same thing several days ago in my response to Microsoft's enforcing single spaces between sentences in MS Office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858129 .) It doesn't seem to matter whether it's commercial software such as Microsoft's Office, or open software such as the GIMP or LibreOffice, etc., they do things their way, not the way users want or are already familiar with. Commercial software is often tempered by commercial reality (keeping compatibility etc.) but even then that's not always so (take Windows Metro UI or Windows 10 for instance, any reasonable user would have to agree they're first-class stuff-ups). That said, GIMP is about the worst out there. "At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century." Right again! GIMP developers seem not only to be hostile towards ordinary users but there's been along-standing bloody mindedness among them that's persisted for decades; effectively it is to not even consider ordinary users within their schema. Nothing says this better than the lack of information about future versions, milestones, etc. All we ever get are vague comments that don't change much from one decade to the next. Perhaps it would be best for all concerned if GIMP's developers actually embedded this message in its installation program: "GIMP is our play toy—it's prototype software for our own use and experimenting—it's NOT for normal user use. You may use it as is but please do not expect it to work like other imaging software and do not bother us with feedback for we'll just ignore you. You have been warned".

bootlooped 7y ago

I have only used GIMP a handful of times in my life. I recently had to download it to do something beyond MS Paint's abilities. I had a hard time understanding why many things behaved the way they did. I don't remember it being this hard the last time I used it.

necovek 7y ago
Whenever UI/UX is brought up, GIMP inevitably enters the discussion. I've used it a number of times and do not find it any harder than any other piece of software — doing complex operations where you are not sure what you want to do (or especially, how is that called) is hard, but that's hard in an IDE as well. I do not do much, but I do not do little with it either — I am perfectly happy with layers, selection tools, simple painting tools and the rudimentary colour correction I may want to do. And one can claim that the hamburger-menu-like approach started with Gimp, fwiw (right click on your image to get to a full menu, though you still had that menu at the top of your image window). Two things have always been a requirement for proper Gimp use: "virtual desktops" — a dedicated one for Gimp — and IMO, "sloppy focus" (window under the pointer gets the focus right away), but I've been using those since at least 2001 or something when I first saw them on Sun workstations, so I probably never had trouble with extra clicks required to focus between toolbars and other dialogs. For creating original artwork, I find any graphical approach too limiting — I _do_ want an easy approach of UIs, but I frequently think in terms of proportions and spatial relationships when drawing ("I want this to be roughly twice the size of this other thing and to the left") — I always try to imagine this combined tool that would fit my workflow, but then I remember that I am probably an outlier: I may have been spoiled having done mathematical drawings as a primary schooler in Metafont and later Metapost (for colour, or rather, grayscale :)), and being a developer since 7th grade, where it's hard for you to come to grips with how suboptimal doing precise drawings in any software is (I've done some minor uni work in AutoCAD too).

nine_k 7y ago

I must be the rare person here who finds that Gimp becomes better and nicer with each release. Yes, I had to explicitly set the way I want the icons to look in settings. It wasn't hard, and one of the bundled sets worked for me. Maybe it's because I'm a long-time user and I know my way around, and where in the settings to look. One of the problems of shipping UIs is setting good defaults. Maybe Gimp does not do a great job here; I should try a Clea installation.

brabel 7y ago

Gimp is probably the only software I use somewhat regularly in which I can absolutely never figure out how to do something new, and if I don't do something for more than a month, I have to google again for how to do it. The level of stupidity in its design surely deserves a reward for unusability.

kebman 7y ago

Long time Adobe user. I tried Gimp. Shut it down, and merrily went back to my Adobe subscription plan.

lisphead 7y ago
Long time emacs user. I tried vim. Shut it down, and merrily went back to my motor memory.
mcswell 7y ago
I haven't used Gimp in perhaps a decade, but I can't imagine a worse UI than Adobe. At home, I have a free PDF reader, but at work (...when I was going to work...), I had to use Adobe's PDF editor. (Not that I edit the PDFs, I mostly just read them; occasionally a highlighter would be nice.) Ugly huge icons that I don't need and which take up lots of space. And next to nothing in the menu, except ways to turn on icon bars at the top and/or side, hopelessly emsmallening the page I actually want to read.

Joeboy 7y ago

> Apparently almost everyone agrees I very much do not. Gimp used to be horrendous to use. It still has some usability issues, but it's become something I can use without risking my mental health.