4 ms·

I had a similar experience with a number of environments a couple of years ago, including macOS, Unity, KDE Plasma, and the often hated Windows 8. It was a refr

I had a similar experience with a number of environments a couple of years ago, including macOS, Unity, KDE Plasma, and the often hated Windows 8. It was a refreshing and exciting journey. I was looking forward to do the same with Gnome 3, but failed. Gnome 3 was a jarring experience with too many design choices that looked good on the surface but had an amateurish execution. It didn't help that some of my colleagues back then who are UI designers were quick to point out all the beginner's design mistakes that are being made in Gnome 3. Mistakes that had been pointed out to the Gnome 3 creators a number of times. But any criticism was always met with arrogant dismissals. I think Gnome 3 tries too hard to be usable on tablets. There are a lot of compromises that waste screen space (especially vertically) and create the need for unusual measures like hamburger menus inside title bars etc. If you look at macOS you can see how buttons in tittle bars are executed professionally. On top of that, it's hardly usable without extensions. And the extension eco system is brittle at best and a security nightmare at worst. Maybe things have changed in the meantime. But my past experience with Gnome was so horrible I'm very reluctant to give it another try.

md8z 5y ago
In my experience, it's not really seen as being good form to raise major criticism about the design unless you have some standing with the designers, drive-by comments don't really help a whole lot as the person may not be making the comments with full knowledge of what the goal and target user is. If they wanted their feedback to be heard, I think it would help to start in smaller areas and then work up from there. The reason the widgets take up a lot of screen space is for accessibility reasons, I think the article mentions how this is a good thing :)
- AnonymousPlanet 5y ago
  macOS, e.g., achieves the same level of accessibility without wasting screen space, without hamburger menus, and without aesthetic mistakes. In my view, the Gnome 3 designers came off as arrogant beginners, dismissing any criticism - even from well known designers - as the ramblings of people stuck in the past. I'd call that bad form as well. I haven't been up to date on this the last years and really hope things have changed for the better and that the Gnome 3 people display more maturity.
  - necovek 5y ago
    That's a pretty arbitrary yet general accusation that I'd find hard to believe about any group of people. Surely there are both arrogant and non-arrogant people in any community, GNOME included. From my time contributing to GNOME (in the 2.x series), I haven't found many arrogant people at all, but times have changed, surely, and I don't know who gets attracted to work on GNOME today. I also find your use of "well known designers" to be a signal that there's some arrogance you (or those other designers) might have displayed. Most of the "well known designers" are unable to accept the reality that heavily translated software needs to support a button "Cancel" that may turn into 100 characters in a translation (I am exaggerating a bit, but some things can turn shorter and others can turn massively longer in a good translation — good design should accommodate both and not require translation to become worse). Not sure how often you were involved in running a popular free software project, but "drive-by opinions" are in abundance. GNOME has long prided itself on being a meritocracy, where merit to GNOME is what's valued. Jony Ive would not get extra points if he wasn't investing enough time into GNOME proper to give him a holistic view of the platform. But the most important part of GNOME being a meritocracy is that you need to convince developers of a need to redesign something, not other designers: GNOME is not a company, it's a collection of individuals sharing _some_ goals. I am guessing whatever opinions were shared were also shared without backing studies or user testing showing significant improvement in the UX without regression in other parts.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I think "well-known" is pretty relative, don't you? It's great if some people have a twitter presence or something like that but if they are not well-known within a certain project then it's not going to help much. I don't think it's useful to assume that everybody knows a person, even within our industry. Or if they do know of the person, they may not know what it's like to work with them, etc. So you have to approach it one step at a time like any relationship. To use macOS in the same way you would probably turn the screen scaling up to get a similar amount of screen real estate :) And to me at least, the global menu in macOS causes other accessibility issues, I've seen hamburger menus done right and they aren't so bad. But the application has to be designed to use them correctly.

md8z 5y ago

In my experience, it's not really seen as being good form to raise major criticism about the design unless you have some standing with the designers, drive-by comments don't really help a whole lot as the person may not be making the comments with full knowledge of what the goal and target user is. If they wanted their feedback to be heard, I think it would help to start in smaller areas and then work up from there. The reason the widgets take up a lot of screen space is for accessibility reasons, I think the article mentions how this is a good thing :)

AnonymousPlanet 5y ago
macOS, e.g., achieves the same level of accessibility without wasting screen space, without hamburger menus, and without aesthetic mistakes. In my view, the Gnome 3 designers came off as arrogant beginners, dismissing any criticism - even from well known designers - as the ramblings of people stuck in the past. I'd call that bad form as well. I haven't been up to date on this the last years and really hope things have changed for the better and that the Gnome 3 people display more maturity.
- necovek 5y ago
  That's a pretty arbitrary yet general accusation that I'd find hard to believe about any group of people. Surely there are both arrogant and non-arrogant people in any community, GNOME included. From my time contributing to GNOME (in the 2.x series), I haven't found many arrogant people at all, but times have changed, surely, and I don't know who gets attracted to work on GNOME today. I also find your use of "well known designers" to be a signal that there's some arrogance you (or those other designers) might have displayed. Most of the "well known designers" are unable to accept the reality that heavily translated software needs to support a button "Cancel" that may turn into 100 characters in a translation (I am exaggerating a bit, but some things can turn shorter and others can turn massively longer in a good translation — good design should accommodate both and not require translation to become worse). Not sure how often you were involved in running a popular free software project, but "drive-by opinions" are in abundance. GNOME has long prided itself on being a meritocracy, where merit to GNOME is what's valued. Jony Ive would not get extra points if he wasn't investing enough time into GNOME proper to give him a holistic view of the platform. But the most important part of GNOME being a meritocracy is that you need to convince developers of a need to redesign something, not other designers: GNOME is not a company, it's a collection of individuals sharing _some_ goals. I am guessing whatever opinions were shared were also shared without backing studies or user testing showing significant improvement in the UX without regression in other parts.
- md8z 5y ago
  I think "well-known" is pretty relative, don't you? It's great if some people have a twitter presence or something like that but if they are not well-known within a certain project then it's not going to help much. I don't think it's useful to assume that everybody knows a person, even within our industry. Or if they do know of the person, they may not know what it's like to work with them, etc. So you have to approach it one step at a time like any relationship. To use macOS in the same way you would probably turn the screen scaling up to get a similar amount of screen real estate :) And to me at least, the global menu in macOS causes other accessibility issues, I've seen hamburger menus done right and they aren't so bad. But the application has to be designed to use them correctly.