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> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be wo

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about as long, and regular FOSS users since the late 90s. Like most other designer/developers I know— there are way more than you think— I contribute code regularly but never design work. Why? Because it's a sucky experience. Most FOSS UIs are akin to someone's first website made from cargo-culted code from free tutorials. Fixing it is harder than starting from scratch and either approach takes significant intellectual work before even seriously proposing changes... and those proposals are received with something on a spectrum of suspicion to outright hostility. Would you contribute code to a project run by people with no coding experience but were extremely opinionated about code, bikeshedded and poopooed all code changes as a matter of course AND referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt you and so many other developers here displayed in your comments? Gosh I hope not. I often hear FOSS developers lament lack of designer involvement, but won't even entertain the prospect of having any culpability for that. I mean, come on. UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. The problems you see in UIs are because the people running the projects Solicited the wrong kind of designers or let people without subject matter expertise trampler on some core features of the design.

FeepingCreature 5y ago
> UI designer proposing changes is received with hostility > solicited the wrong kind of designers This points to me that the root problem is that we can't tell what kind is the wrong kind. It's a trust issue, but also a competence legibility issue. That said- > referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt Uh yeah? Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt.
- chefandy 5y ago
  > can't tell what kind is the wrong kind To some extent you can tell from their title and previous work, just like with developers. Foe example, I had an entirely non-technical boss that understood I might not be the guy to re-write some printer drivers because I was a web developer. He didn't know the specifics, but being in charge, knew he had to ask someone who did, or do enough research to figure it out. Likewise, UI designers will specialize in designing UIs and be better at making buttons look like buttons than Graphic Designers, and Experience Designers will be better at integrating user feedback and research into projects. Just like you wouldn't trust any one developer to implement critical functionality you don't understand without outside input, you probably shouldn't rely on one designer to that either. If you maintain a project, though, you can't expect designers to instinctually work around what you don't know. Being in charge means that you're in charge of figuring out how to evaluate it. I'm positive that a "I'm not sure how to interface with this sort of thing. Let's work through it so I can figure it out." will be received kindly by people you should consider working with. Good design proposals should already come with explanation and justification to help you down the path This is a random selection from a google image search of proposal ideas. It was from another post where I was talking about higher-level topics but the principle is the same. Changing a set of control widgets should require no less thought and explanation. https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/759 https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/759 https://github.com/stashapp/stash/issues/1549 https://github.com/stashapp/stash/issues/1549 https://github.com/newrelic/nr1-groundskeeper/issues/3 https://github.com/newrelic/nr1-groundskeeper/issues/3 https://github.com/creativecommons/creativecommons.github.io-source/issues/189 https://github.com/creativecommons/creativecommons.github.io... https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1823 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1823 > Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt. ok— now copy and paste the rest of what I wrote. An overly opinionated, defensive person with veto powers that understands the purpose and value of your work is fundamentally different.
sime2009 5y ago
The complaint about flat design isn't levelled only at FOSS, but at the whole industry. Your points may explain the situation in FOSS, but it doesn't explain the poor work being put out by the thousands of designers and UI/UX people working as professionals in industry. The failings of flat design are everywhere.
- berkes 5y ago
  I'd go as far as to say that these failings started in proprietary software, hyped, marketed and then copied by FLOSS.
- ansible 5y ago
  Part of me wants to throw up my hands in the air and cry out "Why, God, why?" when I encounter yet another UI with flat design. It is like a mass delusion or something that some segment of the population seems to think it that flat design is actually useful for the everyday user. We've seen other stupid useless crap spread like a wave across our industry, across our society... so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Though I've started to question my own sanity.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Modern UI design is optimized for screenshots in a PowerPoint, and from there, to screenshots in a portfolio and on marketing pages where the audience that needs to be satisfied is marketing themselves, and especially people very concerned that every piece of everything be "on brand" and who are entirely sure this matters a ton for making sales. That's what's going on, as far as I can tell.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- chefandy 5y ago
  First, I was addressing design in FOSS because: a) there probably aren't many lead designers, creative directors and art directors on this developer-centric site b) interface choices for most commercial products are deliberately made by other people c) interface choices for most FOSS projects are made by developers Second, I didn't directly address the criticism for the same reason I don't go into game forums and argue with the inevitable teen tech wizard lobbing glib, unsubstantiated technical criticism at the "stupid devs." Their peers might believe their saying that a "microservices architecture" caused low frame rates in the last release, but professional developers will roll their eyes hard enough to sprain an eyelid. I won't waste my time with a point-by-point teardown, but if you're actually interested, here's the first half dozen unsubstantiated assumptions I've seen here about design/designers and the design process: - 'Flat designs' are uniform enough to judge their value as a unit. - A bad flat design was bad because it was flat— not the hundreds of other problems a design can have. - Designers change things solely to suit their taste or follow trends - Designers don't commonly test or measure usability with quantifiable, auditable data - Bad usability is acceptable if it looks good. - How well you parse something is representative of how everybody else does regardless of their culture, age, experience with other objects, experience with computers, vision, disabilities, etc. - Skeuomorphism was the most effective form to convey those visual cues. aaaand the list goes on. It's fine that many developers don't totally understand how design works because nobody expects you to be a subject matter expert in anything other than development. That said, confidently making sweeping judgements about design and designers when you don't understand some important fundamentals is just bad form.
xg15 5y ago
> UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. As a developer who always had an interest in UI design but has zero formal education in the field, I be really interested to know more about this. Could you maybe explain some of those strategies? My subjective impression is that design has shifted from building a consistent "language" to a more goal-driven and data-driven approach today. The product owner defines a list of user stories and UI is primarily concerned with making those user stories as frictionless as possible - even if this means a less consistent overall design snd even if it means that less common features become harder to use. Performance is measured in a feedback loop through telemetry and A/B tests. I might be wrong though, so I'd be interested in a qualified opinion. (Also disclaimer: I grew up with Windows 98, ME/2000 and XP. So I guess this is my "good old times" spot then, where I'm wearing the rose-coloured glasses.)
- chefandy 5y ago
  Yay! UI design is cool. I really love helping people solve their problems with software and often find the intellectual work involved with crafting their interactions to be far more interesting than getting the best algorithm for something, implementing the most reliable architecture, etc. What I believe you're noticing is the the adoption of ideas under the (poorly named, IMO) UX umbrella. UI design is either considered part of it, or close enough to get the UX/UI slash treatment. It's not quite there as an idea— people can't decide if UX people are the same or UX Researchers are different than UX Designers or if UX Designers just do wireframes and user flows or also design UIs or if that's left to Interaction designers, blah blah blah. The base ideas seem to be an amalgam of human factors engineering, graphic/media design communication theories, and quantitative marketing type work. While there are hundreds of trillions of articles on the topic by people thirsty for medium claps, I think the most interesting jumping-off point might be an image search for ux design process and using the charts you see to guide an exploration. The Nielsen Norman group has a TON of stuff online about the topic. Not just design itself, but measuring the maturity of usability organizations, research techniques, best practices and data strategies... I mean all kinds of stuff. I think a lot of the ideas are tremendously valuable but much of what's written about it feels a little bit too much like marketing material. The ideas are presented a bit too confidently considering how often they change, and too much has that LinkedIN magic bullet kind of vibe. Also, like tech, the industry is subject to spike trends (like tech saw with NoSQL databases) and pendulum swings (like centralization vs. decentralization of services, thin vs thick clients, etc.) For something a bit more structured, the former Lynda.com, now LinkedIn Learning has some really fantastic educational resources on modern design of nearly any stripe. I'll swing back through if I can think of any specific resources worth checking out.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

> UI designer proposing changes is received with hostility > solicited the wrong kind of designers This points to me that the root problem is that we can't tell what kind is the wrong kind. It's a trust issue, but also a competence legibility issue. That said- > referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt Uh yeah? Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt.

chefandy 5y ago
> can't tell what kind is the wrong kind To some extent you can tell from their title and previous work, just like with developers. Foe example, I had an entirely non-technical boss that understood I might not be the guy to re-write some printer drivers because I was a web developer. He didn't know the specifics, but being in charge, knew he had to ask someone who did, or do enough research to figure it out. Likewise, UI designers will specialize in designing UIs and be better at making buttons look like buttons than Graphic Designers, and Experience Designers will be better at integrating user feedback and research into projects. Just like you wouldn't trust any one developer to implement critical functionality you don't understand without outside input, you probably shouldn't rely on one designer to that either. If you maintain a project, though, you can't expect designers to instinctually work around what you don't know. Being in charge means that you're in charge of figuring out how to evaluate it. I'm positive that a "I'm not sure how to interface with this sort of thing. Let's work through it so I can figure it out." will be received kindly by people you should consider working with. Good design proposals should already come with explanation and justification to help you down the path This is a random selection from a google image search of proposal ideas. It was from another post where I was talking about higher-level topics but the principle is the same. Changing a set of control widgets should require no less thought and explanation. https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/759 https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/759 https://github.com/stashapp/stash/issues/1549 https://github.com/stashapp/stash/issues/1549 https://github.com/newrelic/nr1-groundskeeper/issues/3 https://github.com/newrelic/nr1-groundskeeper/issues/3 https://github.com/creativecommons/creativecommons.github.io-source/issues/189 https://github.com/creativecommons/creativecommons.github.io... https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1823 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1823 > Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt. ok— now copy and paste the rest of what I wrote. An overly opinionated, defensive person with veto powers that understands the purpose and value of your work is fundamentally different.

sime2009 5y ago

The complaint about flat design isn't levelled only at FOSS, but at the whole industry. Your points may explain the situation in FOSS, but it doesn't explain the poor work being put out by the thousands of designers and UI/UX people working as professionals in industry. The failings of flat design are everywhere.

berkes 5y ago
I'd go as far as to say that these failings started in proprietary software, hyped, marketed and then copied by FLOSS.
ansible 5y ago
Part of me wants to throw up my hands in the air and cry out "Why, God, why?" when I encounter yet another UI with flat design. It is like a mass delusion or something that some segment of the population seems to think it that flat design is actually useful for the everyday user. We've seen other stupid useless crap spread like a wave across our industry, across our society... so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Though I've started to question my own sanity.
- brimble 5y ago
  Modern UI design is optimized for screenshots in a PowerPoint, and from there, to screenshots in a portfolio and on marketing pages where the audience that needs to be satisfied is marketing themselves, and especially people very concerned that every piece of everything be "on brand" and who are entirely sure this matters a ton for making sales. That's what's going on, as far as I can tell.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
chefandy 5y ago
First, I was addressing design in FOSS because: a) there probably aren't many lead designers, creative directors and art directors on this developer-centric site b) interface choices for most commercial products are deliberately made by other people c) interface choices for most FOSS projects are made by developers Second, I didn't directly address the criticism for the same reason I don't go into game forums and argue with the inevitable teen tech wizard lobbing glib, unsubstantiated technical criticism at the "stupid devs." Their peers might believe their saying that a "microservices architecture" caused low frame rates in the last release, but professional developers will roll their eyes hard enough to sprain an eyelid. I won't waste my time with a point-by-point teardown, but if you're actually interested, here's the first half dozen unsubstantiated assumptions I've seen here about design/designers and the design process: - 'Flat designs' are uniform enough to judge their value as a unit. - A bad flat design was bad because it was flat— not the hundreds of other problems a design can have. - Designers change things solely to suit their taste or follow trends - Designers don't commonly test or measure usability with quantifiable, auditable data - Bad usability is acceptable if it looks good. - How well you parse something is representative of how everybody else does regardless of their culture, age, experience with other objects, experience with computers, vision, disabilities, etc. - Skeuomorphism was the most effective form to convey those visual cues. aaaand the list goes on. It's fine that many developers don't totally understand how design works because nobody expects you to be a subject matter expert in anything other than development. That said, confidently making sweeping judgements about design and designers when you don't understand some important fundamentals is just bad form.

xg15 5y ago

> UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. As a developer who always had an interest in UI design but has zero formal education in the field, I be really interested to know more about this. Could you maybe explain some of those strategies? My subjective impression is that design has shifted from building a consistent "language" to a more goal-driven and data-driven approach today. The product owner defines a list of user stories and UI is primarily concerned with making those user stories as frictionless as possible - even if this means a less consistent overall design snd even if it means that less common features become harder to use. Performance is measured in a feedback loop through telemetry and A/B tests. I might be wrong though, so I'd be interested in a qualified opinion. (Also disclaimer: I grew up with Windows 98, ME/2000 and XP. So I guess this is my "good old times" spot then, where I'm wearing the rose-coloured glasses.)

chefandy 5y ago
Yay! UI design is cool. I really love helping people solve their problems with software and often find the intellectual work involved with crafting their interactions to be far more interesting than getting the best algorithm for something, implementing the most reliable architecture, etc. What I believe you're noticing is the the adoption of ideas under the (poorly named, IMO) UX umbrella. UI design is either considered part of it, or close enough to get the UX/UI slash treatment. It's not quite there as an idea— people can't decide if UX people are the same or UX Researchers are different than UX Designers or if UX Designers just do wireframes and user flows or also design UIs or if that's left to Interaction designers, blah blah blah. The base ideas seem to be an amalgam of human factors engineering, graphic/media design communication theories, and quantitative marketing type work. While there are hundreds of trillions of articles on the topic by people thirsty for medium claps, I think the most interesting jumping-off point might be an image search for ux design process and using the charts you see to guide an exploration. The Nielsen Norman group has a TON of stuff online about the topic. Not just design itself, but measuring the maturity of usability organizations, research techniques, best practices and data strategies... I mean all kinds of stuff. I think a lot of the ideas are tremendously valuable but much of what's written about it feels a little bit too much like marketing material. The ideas are presented a bit too confidently considering how often they change, and too much has that LinkedIN magic bullet kind of vibe. Also, like tech, the industry is subject to spike trends (like tech saw with NoSQL databases) and pendulum swings (like centralization vs. decentralization of services, thin vs thick clients, etc.) For something a bit more structured, the former Lynda.com, now LinkedIn Learning has some really fantastic educational resources on modern design of nearly any stripe. I'll swing back through if I can think of any specific resources worth checking out.