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>In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their ow
by zxzax 5y ago
>In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their own crappy ideas instead. Sometimes while arrogantly dunking on the designer who tried to make a contribution. Consequently, UX quality is abysmal, and anyone who could fix that is driven away. I don’t see a solution to this.
Generally, going into an open source project as a stranger and suggesting to make architectural changes without expectation of pushback is not a good idea. Any change there is going to trample on someone else's workflow. You have to build up trust first before people see you as an authority, that is the solution and it's often the only one. It's worked for some projects such as the recent post about Audacity, even though it's a bit of an extreme example because the person was already established as a well-known designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995610
I don't blame the programmer for dismissing suggestions they don't understand but it's also not cool if you were "dunked on" so I'm sorry if that was your experience. Keep in mind that's still better than some, a lot of projects will just ignore suggestions completely if they figure you're just not part of their target audience, and they don't have the budget to expand that audience.
- codeflo 5y agoNo need to be sorry, I'm not the designer in this story -- I'm the grumpy sofware engineer, and nowadays sometimes the manager. I'm also a desktop Linux user who is regularly annoyed by the sad and confusing state of opensource UX. What makes me so pessimistic is that I know the social dynamics that typically cause this, and have seen them play out in lots and lots of mailing list discussions. Of course that's not a logical inevitability, things can change with more understanding. Your link actually makes me very happy, I hadn't seen this. Let's hope that this works out, and becomes a model that more OSS project can follow.