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> If you view everything as a UX issue that can simply be solved by moving things around That isn't what UX is about. I am making games, and stuff that isn't s

> If you view everything as a UX issue that can simply be solved by moving things around That isn't what UX is about. I am making games, and stuff that isn't simply moving things about is a core part of user experience. For example consider a game where you want to move around armies on a map. You can implement that by moving around the armies using numpad only, or you can calculate a shortest path on a mouse click to a location and show it to the user. Both allows the same kind of movement, but the second offers way better user experience which is why all modern big strategy games uses it over one step at a time movement. > but my point is you can't just get that by changing around the ellipse select tool I never said that a good UX was easy, I just said that the developers of GIMP didn't want to put into the work to make GIMP have good UX, and a lot of that work is redesigning the technical architecture or implementing those features the tedious ugly way. It is possible to make it decently easy to make easy to use tools for gimp, I just don't know all the details of what those tools should do exactly but I know how to build that sort of things. When making games you don't have as patient users as you have in GIMP, so you'd never get away with that kind of UX, so from my perspective when your product has GIMP's level of UX then it isn't complete as a product since it would basically ensure business failure.

zxzax 5y ago
I'm not much of a gamer but what you are describing doesn't seem to be relevant, for example there are simpler games where moving using numpad is perfectly usable and desired. There is not really anything specific you're designing for there, you just chose to make that type of game. >the developers of GIMP didn't want to put into the work to make GIMP have good UX From what I have heard from GIMP developers, this is not correct. There is plenty of desire to fix issues, the main issue is lack of contributors. Please help if that's what you're interested in. You're talking about "getting away with the UX" but I'm also not sure what you're talking about there, GIMP is not a commercial product that is trying to get customers. It's an open source project driven by volunteers who improve it in their free time because they feel like it.
- username90 5y ago
  From experience I am almost certain the issue has to do with architecture, the original developers didn't properly consider UX when making the first steps and that has shaped how everything else was implemented in it, and this is the end result. Fixing it at that stage is way too much work as you said, rewriting all tools and the UI from scratch would probably be the easiest way to fix the UX at this point. If it was easy then it would have been fixed as it is an open project as you said.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    That's true to an extent, but the backend changes should make it more feasible to refactor the UI or to build alternative UIs with other feature sets.

zxzax 5y ago

I'm not much of a gamer but what you are describing doesn't seem to be relevant, for example there are simpler games where moving using numpad is perfectly usable and desired. There is not really anything specific you're designing for there, you just chose to make that type of game. >the developers of GIMP didn't want to put into the work to make GIMP have good UX From what I have heard from GIMP developers, this is not correct. There is plenty of desire to fix issues, the main issue is lack of contributors. Please help if that's what you're interested in. You're talking about "getting away with the UX" but I'm also not sure what you're talking about there, GIMP is not a commercial product that is trying to get customers. It's an open source project driven by volunteers who improve it in their free time because they feel like it.

username90 5y ago
From experience I am almost certain the issue has to do with architecture, the original developers didn't properly consider UX when making the first steps and that has shaped how everything else was implemented in it, and this is the end result. Fixing it at that stage is way too much work as you said, rewriting all tools and the UI from scratch would probably be the easiest way to fix the UX at this point. If it was easy then it would have been fixed as it is an open project as you said.
- zxzax 5y ago
  That's true to an extent, but the backend changes should make it more feasible to refactor the UI or to build alternative UIs with other feature sets.