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Why does everyone point out GIMP as having bad UX? You apt-get install it, you double click on your photo, you use a pretty standard WIMP interface to edit it.

by swiley 5y ago

Why does everyone point out GIMP as having bad UX? You apt-get install it, you double click on your photo, you use a pretty standard WIMP interface to edit it. Compared to modern Adobe software that's fucking amazing.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I'm fairly certain literally everyone who works with image editing for a living will disagree with you on that. Hell, even Paint.NET has a better interface than GIMP.
- swiley 5y ago
  If we're going to get into specialized software why not compare OpenSSH to RDP?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- zxzax 5y ago
  It would be nice if you were more specific. Most of the serious complaints I see artists making about GIMP are about lack of non-destructive editing features, or about lack of support for specific workflows, which are technical issues, not UX ones (and ones that are being addressed, slowly).
  - username90 5y ago
    I want to do a basic thing in gimp, draw a circle. How do you do that? First you click the rectangle button, then you select "elipse select", then you select an area, then you click edit and fill with color. This flow is much more unintuitive compared to anything else I've seen, why would you click on the rectangle to draw an ellipse? And then suddenly that button is no an ellipse, so next time you want to draw a rectangle you now have to click on the ellipse button and switch it back to a rectangle. And that is just one thing, the whole program is littered with small obnoxious design decisions like that. Maybe you can learn to get used to it after a while, but if you have to go through a tutorial and get lost the first 20 times you try to draw a basic shape then your drawing program has bad UX. In the end you will learn that the ellipse button and rectangle button are the same things etc, but until you learn all those things the program is just frustrating to use.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      That again is not a UX issue, that is a lack of shape tools for that particular workflow. Like, this is not something you can fix just by moving some buttons around or by changing the name of the ellipse tool to circle draw tool and having it fill automatically (i.e. bugfix-type things that a UX person would do), somebody has to implement an entirely new feature for that to work the way you are expecting, and then it would need to be redesigned as well. And GIMP historically has not been focused on shape drawing. If you want an open source program that focuses on shapes and vector drawing, you may want to use Krita or Inkscape. Or you can try developing what you're looking for as a GIMP plugin, and the going from there and trying to get it merged upstream if it's popular enough.
      - username90 5y ago
        UX is User Experience, not User Interface. Lack of tools to do things quickly and easily with discoverability is a huge UX issue. And then the rectangle button changing to an ellipse button just because that was the most recent sub tool you used is a UX issue that is purely in the UI. I probably lost several hours to that until I understood what happened, because I couldn't find the buttons I wanted to click on and then assumed I had to look for them elsewhere etc. And it still is bad even after I learned that since everywhere I look at tutorials how to do stuff the menu looks different since they had different previously active tools so it is a pain trying to figure out what to click.
        zxzax 5y ago
        What you're saying doesn't really make any sense to me, that's like saying you bought a sedan and found that it didn't have a pickup bed, so now it's a UX issue because you couldn't quickly and easily figure out how to move a refrigerator with it. Not everything is going to have the same tools, or support the same workflows. Maybe that's a problem that needs solving but it can't be solved by UX designers trying to redesign the sedan -- you would just get a trailer and put the refrigerator in that. You're right about the tool menus, those are an actual UI issue, but they can be disabled. Maybe they should be disabled by default? I can't say.
beckingz 5y ago
Agreed. Gimp is feature rich and has a high learning curve. This is not the same thing as bad UX.

by swiley 5y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I'm fairly certain literally everyone who works with image editing for a living will disagree with you on that. Hell, even Paint.NET has a better interface than GIMP.

swiley 5y ago
If we're going to get into specialized software why not compare OpenSSH to RDP?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zxzax 5y ago
It would be nice if you were more specific. Most of the serious complaints I see artists making about GIMP are about lack of non-destructive editing features, or about lack of support for specific workflows, which are technical issues, not UX ones (and ones that are being addressed, slowly).
- username90 5y ago
  I want to do a basic thing in gimp, draw a circle. How do you do that? First you click the rectangle button, then you select "elipse select", then you select an area, then you click edit and fill with color. This flow is much more unintuitive compared to anything else I've seen, why would you click on the rectangle to draw an ellipse? And then suddenly that button is no an ellipse, so next time you want to draw a rectangle you now have to click on the ellipse button and switch it back to a rectangle. And that is just one thing, the whole program is littered with small obnoxious design decisions like that. Maybe you can learn to get used to it after a while, but if you have to go through a tutorial and get lost the first 20 times you try to draw a basic shape then your drawing program has bad UX. In the end you will learn that the ellipse button and rectangle button are the same things etc, but until you learn all those things the program is just frustrating to use.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    That again is not a UX issue, that is a lack of shape tools for that particular workflow. Like, this is not something you can fix just by moving some buttons around or by changing the name of the ellipse tool to circle draw tool and having it fill automatically (i.e. bugfix-type things that a UX person would do), somebody has to implement an entirely new feature for that to work the way you are expecting, and then it would need to be redesigned as well. And GIMP historically has not been focused on shape drawing. If you want an open source program that focuses on shapes and vector drawing, you may want to use Krita or Inkscape. Or you can try developing what you're looking for as a GIMP plugin, and the going from there and trying to get it merged upstream if it's popular enough.
    - username90 5y ago
      UX is User Experience, not User Interface. Lack of tools to do things quickly and easily with discoverability is a huge UX issue. And then the rectangle button changing to an ellipse button just because that was the most recent sub tool you used is a UX issue that is purely in the UI. I probably lost several hours to that until I understood what happened, because I couldn't find the buttons I wanted to click on and then assumed I had to look for them elsewhere etc. And it still is bad even after I learned that since everywhere I look at tutorials how to do stuff the menu looks different since they had different previously active tools so it is a pain trying to figure out what to click.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        What you're saying doesn't really make any sense to me, that's like saying you bought a sedan and found that it didn't have a pickup bed, so now it's a UX issue because you couldn't quickly and easily figure out how to move a refrigerator with it. Not everything is going to have the same tools, or support the same workflows. Maybe that's a problem that needs solving but it can't be solved by UX designers trying to redesign the sedan -- you would just get a trailer and put the refrigerator in that. You're right about the tool menus, those are an actual UI issue, but they can be disabled. Maybe they should be disabled by default? I can't say.

beckingz 5y ago

Agreed. Gimp is feature rich and has a high learning curve. This is not the same thing as bad UX.