9 ms·

Open Source Needs a New UI

71 points by cobychapple 15y ago

lukeholder 15y ago
There is an obvious reason for this, most of the well designed projects have financial backing (a company that consults around the product/library) and as such have the resources. They want the platform/app to succeed because they finically benefit. Good UX is good for business.
portentint 15y ago
It's all about time. You're writing an open-source project - I know SOME lucky folks get paid to do it, but not most - and you have to just get the damned thing working. Once you do, you have to go back to your job, or whatever else feeds your face. The UX has to wait. And wait. And wait.
- vilya 15y ago
  I think it's on a par with clean, well commented code: people with the right experience and know-how can do it as they go without any extra effort; others will need to go back and rework it to get to the same point - and that's time that they probably won't get. I guess I'm trying to be optimistic and say that it can be done, but it requires a certain amount of discipline.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  I don't think this is really the core issue. If you're not getting paid to work on an open source project, chances are you're doing it just because you simply love programming. You probably aren't an expert designer, and, more pertinently, you're probably more than happy with what you have. In my experience, building a UI makes you blind to its shortcomings. There are methods and procedures around this, but if you just love programming, chances are you don't know them. I found this out myself when I saw my dad struggle to use even a simple chess game I designed. When you've made something, you naturally know it inside-out; nobody else is going to have nearly that much experience with it.
munaf 15y ago
Generally, I agree with the article. But I've been seeing a lot of projects that lead me to believe developers are becoming more design-minded. Many new JS libraries, for example, are beautifully presented. My hunch has always been that GitHub is setting a trend for OSS developers to present content to each other in a clean and pretty way. Hopefully that extends to the apps they create.
- aangjie 15y ago
  +1 for GitHub... I think they are doing some good.. and would love to see that as a standard for UI design of open-source projects to follow. Though am not sure..
nknight 15y ago
Right now, GNOME is probably the last example you should cite as "getting it right" if you're trying to convince open source developers of something. GNOME's UI decisions of late are not particularly popular with the crowd you need to convince.
- cobychapple 15y ago
  I realise it hasn't been popular, and I'm not the biggest fan either, but my point isn't about what's popular amongst open source developers. Also, if developers need to be convinced of the need for good design I think that's a good example of the problem right there.
  - nknight 15y ago
    You don't need to convince them of the need for good design, you need to convince them that what they're doing now isn't good design, and that they should do something different. I'm saying, citing the project they think is an example of bad design isn't going to help, your opinion will carry less weight.
- uokesita 15y ago
  I like to view it as, gnome at least do some 'renewals' and changes to their site and stuff, oposite as the other sites and software.
- Jach 15y ago
  I don't know about the author, but I think Gnome 2 is really the best desktop design out there. Gnome 3 on the other hand... I'd agree that right now it's not looking very good.
mikecsh 15y ago
Perhaps there is a difficulty in getting designers involved with open source software projects. As a freelance web developer you could overhaul a few of the promotional websites for the software you use and find poorly promoted. Perhaps better tools are needed to make it easier for designers to contribute - maybe this could be addressed in someoway by someone like Github.
naner 15y ago
Yes, we know. Since you're a designer why not offer your time to some open source project you use instead of just offering your criticism.
- cobychapple 15y ago
  You mean like I did for http://mentoring.is http://mentoring.is (as discussed here: http://blog.cobychapple.com/blog/2011/09/18/a-distributed-mentoring-movement/ http://blog.cobychapple.com/blog/2011/09/18/a-distributed-me...)?
  - naner 15y ago
    No, I don't think so... isn't that just a page that says "hey, contact me if you want me to mentor you"? I meant reaching out to an open source project that you use in an effort to become a contributor.
    - cobychapple 15y ago
      Point taken. FWIW, helping with the mentoring.is page (albeit a small project) is what got me started about this whole topic. I've been talking with a couple of mentors (who are heavily involved in open source themselves) about how I can contribute to some of my favourite projects, and it's definitely something I plan to do as I get free time.
      - naner 15y ago
        Sounds good. Open source projects tend to be lacking non-programmer volunteers and the design aspect gets overlooked a lot. Hopefully you'll find some good projects that are receptive to outside design help. Sorry, I didn't quite grasp what you were implying earlier. I didn't realize that you were a fan of the mentoring.is project and then offered them your help (which is what I was encouraging you to do), I thought you had just set up a mentoring page for yourself (which seemed unrelated).
      - pinwale 15y ago
jdthomas 15y ago
I think this has a lot to do with not having to sell anything to anyone. OSS projects are, in general, less concerned with converting users than commercial software -- you like our project join us and use it else 'meh'. While, it would be nice to have a shinny surface on oss projects, I think it is unnecessary. As someone who recently (for work) switched from using Linux boxes to a MacBook Pro, I would generally take the less shiny functionality over the pretty pictures any day. (\cough\ keyboard shortcut to lock screen \cough\) :)
- namank 15y ago
  Ctrl+Shift+Eject. to turn off the screen. To lock it, set your laptop to it to lock after 5 secs and then use the above.
  - jdthomas 15y ago
    HOLY CRAP!! Thank you! ... Wow, I must be retarded or not have looked hard enough as the second google result now shows that. :D Anyway Mucho gracias.
    - technomancy 15y ago
      Haven't you heard? Mac OS X is intuitive.
    - namank 15y ago
      yeah, no worries. its bit of a hack in itself. I don't get why Apple doesn't implement a more explicit shortcut...maybe because most of their hardware is laptop and with laptops most people probably shut the screen which locks the mac automatically? Who knows!
  - jcromartie 15y ago
    And Command + Option + Eject to sleep it. Also, mouse hotcorners work.
namank 15y ago
A very fair point and I think this is mostly because we, as an industry/society, have only recently begun to pay attention to UX. I'm not going to buy arguments that say good software has (needs) enterprise backing. Open software, more often than not, follows well established industry trends. UX is only just becoming a trend. The same arguments that ten years ago applied to open software can today be applied to good UX. Thats that. Thats all there is to it. Give it time, it'll happen. Better yet, MAKE it happen...be the first one to revamp Cyberduck's interface.
omouse 15y ago
Unfortunately, the better UI doesn't mean a better product. Working with Magento for example has been a pain in different ways. It sure does look pretty though even when you're debugging things! ;-)
philjackson 15y ago
I made an effort with http://apiaxle.com http://apiaxle.com. Very much a work in progress...
- schraeds 15y ago
  Looks pretty good. I am a UI/UX designer and would love to help out for free to boost my portfolio. A few ideas.. Center large gear image on icon, move smaller to right a bit and reduce in size. Smooth out banding a bit on metal texture. Change button text from "Try it Now" to something like "Download Now", "Learn More", "Get Started" or a combination of the above. Current button seems like free trial and might scare some users off vs being free. Email in my profile if you want to talk more!
  - philjackson 15y ago
    Thanks, schraeds. The idea was that people would pay for my support/development so I would like people to suspect a certain degree of 'commercialness' which is why I chose 'try it now'.
rhlee 15y ago
This reminds me of what David Siegel (creator of Gnome Do & Docky) said once at a Ubuntu Developer Summit. Each open source project should have a design advocate whose sole role is constantly make sure that as much though goes into usability as the code.
_dps 15y ago
I think a large source of the UX quality gap for volunteer-driven Open Source products is the grossly underestimated cost of getting good UX. I submit (without proof) that volunteer Open Source efforts are great at competing on easily quantified dimensions (foos per cycle, feature parity) and not-as-great at competing on dimensions that take anything other than free time and a computer to evaluate. It's very expensive to truly evaluate UX quality of complex products, except at a bare minimum level of "can users do what they want without being harassed". Measuring UX quality means finding the common appeal in a potentially large and heterogeneous group (as a heuristic: the more heterogeneous the audience's tastes, the less satisfying volunteer-based solutions tend to be). To find the common appeal in a large heterogeneous group you have to interact with a lot of people and measure them repeatedly because people's tastes for complex products is not something that can be well-modeled by point-in-time measurements (e.g. it took me a few weeks to discover my MacBook's 4-finger touchpad gestures). Apache is an excellent competitor in the web server market (very narrow, highly technical audience). GIMP has a decent, but not huge following (somewhat broader audience, but still specialists). Open/Libre Office, GNUmeric, and GNUcash are not going to replace their commercial competitors any time soon.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  > To find the common appeal in a large heterogeneous group you have to interact with a lot of people and measure them repeatedly because people's tastes for complex products is not something that can be well-modeled Or you could just go out and hire a good designer. Your comment just illustrates the problem why a lot of computer geeks don't get taste: they assume it's something you go out and measure. Any good designer will tell you: you do not measure taste and design for two simple reasons: (1) public taste is constantly changing, and (2) as soon as you can measure something, it's outdated. I call it the Heisenberg uncertainty of taste. If you go to the trouble of polling 10 million people, you will be 3 years behind; measuring the opinion of 100 million individuals will set you back 6 years behind the curve or maybe more. The kind of minimalistic web design that is commonly seen right now and which Facebook, Apple, Google, and others use was hot among the designer circles about seven years ago. If you tried measuring public taste at that time, you would get a result sheet listing PHP.net as "the" design to copy. You don't measure good design, you define it by producing something that's good and usable in some basic aspects yet not seen before and interesting in others.
thinker 15y ago
I've been thinking about this situation myself this last month and wanted to help give back to the OSS community as a designer/front-end developer - but I didn't know where to start. I'm considering building a simple matchmaking site that lets open source project developers request for design/front-end help and for designers/front-enders to offer up their time as well. Would anyone be interested in this if I built it or has this already been done?
- cobychapple 15y ago
  I think this would be a great project!
- mcantelon 15y ago
  Great idea. Haven't heard of this being done.
SeanLuke 15y ago
To see what's wrong with UIs, we need look no further than X. Consider the myriad of UIs which run on X, many of which aren't compatible with one another: starting with Athena, through Motif widgets, through competing Gnome and KDE, GNUStep, and so on. There must be dozens of major toolkits historically. What caused this mess? Openness and the hacker nature did. A UI needs a bully: someone who says that you will do text fields this way, and if you don't like it, tough. Consistency is absolutely crucial in a successful UI. In Windows, the bully is Microsoft. In OS X the bully is Apple. Open systems by their very nature don't have a single dictator. A UI also needs a bully to force simpler designs. X is replete with applications that have every single possible configuration option. It's part of the tradition. The problem is that this makes the applications extraordinarily unfriendly to the 99% of the population who want to get work done, in favor of the 1% hackers who like to tweak. It's a rare X application which doesn't suffer from this malady: indeed X does itself. There's no one to tell these application designers that their propeller-hats are screwed on too tight. I don't know if there is a way to fix this. Simplicity and consistency are the two most important features of a UI, and the open nature of Linux, X, etc. simply run against them. When a bully arrives to the Linux world (such as Google in Android) you start seeing quality again. Without it, you wind up with Maemo.
- philjr 15y ago
  More of a benevolent dictator really
- saucerful 15y ago
  > Consider the myriad of UIs which run on X, many of which aren't compatible with one another If you are referring to window toolkits, they are all compatible in the sense that you can run different ones side-by-side. If you are referring to window managers, you only need one. If you are referring to a consistent look, the two major ones (GTK and Qt) each have themes which render their widgets in the other toolkit (GTK-Qt and QGtkStyle, respectively). I can vouch for GTK-Qt. It works.
  - jebblue 15y ago
    Totally agree, UI's do not need to be overseen by an overlord of design. I can right now start up a KDE app or a Gnome app and they happily co-exist. Try to pull of something like that on oh Windows, Mac or Android. At least I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on those OS's.
the_mat 15y ago
"most of these sites look stuck in a much older paradigm of thinking about web design" This needs some explanation. The vim site looks dated, but clearly I'm not enough of an insidery web guy to know why some of these sites are stuck in a much older paradigm. In fact, I'm kind of lost on the purpose of the entire rant. UI is important? Is that the takeway? Why even write an article about that?
- Jach 15y ago
  If the vim site is outdated, so is Amazon's. (Okay, Amazon's less so, but I think the taste issue is more from the tabular layout than the lack of gradients or rollovers. Just my thoughts though.) vim itself has a fantastic UX. As for the rant, I think people need to be reminded of such obvious things quite often. "What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It's overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball." -Jerry Cleaver
  - DanBC 15y ago
    The Amazon site is just hideous on so many different levels. Just awful. As well as looking not great it's hard to use and some aspects (search) are broken. The Vim site looks a bit dated, but it serves its purpose. I can't really comment without seeing someone do a makeover. When I'm looking for information I prefer a bunch of nicely marked up text rather than snippets of text scattered over various shiny image heavy pages. The Vim website even tells people how to get involved with making it better - (http://vimonline.sourceforge.net/ http://vimonline.sourceforge.net/)
reledi 15y ago
I agree that UI in FOSS is often terrible, but as munaf mentions below, developers are becoming more design-minded and it's slowly changing. It's hard to get designers to contribute to FOSS, I don't know why. A lot of developers simply don't care or do care but don't know enough about design to do a great job (I fall in the latter category but I think I'm quickly improving). The recent trend is that FOSS projects want to have good UI, but they need help. Designers don't need be involved with a specific FOSS project, they can for example create beautiful icons and openly release them. Toolkits such as Bootstrap by Twitter and Foundation by ZURB have been a big help.
- lazerwalker 15y ago
  I think what's tough is that FOSS design generally ends up as design by committee, with a tendency towards introducing more configurability (and thus more complexity) as a means of appeasing everyone when dissension arises. From an engineering standpoint, that's part of what makes FOSS great. From a design standpoint, that sounds like a gig from hell.
swanson 15y ago
I've always wondered why designers don't point to open source as a portfolio like some developers do. As a developer, I would imagine that there aren't many better ways to land a job at a tech company than designing a logo or brand identity for a cool open source project. There is no shortage of projects on github that don't even have something as simple as a logo or an About page. To me, seeing a portfolio of tech-related material sure beats 25 brochure-style sites for a local winery or wedding photographer.
- chii 15y ago
  "designing a logo or brand identity for a cool open source project. " a logo or a brand does not a good UI make. What you need is indepth research and intuition into what a user "feels" at home with - especially with programs targeted at the non-technical user. This is an amazingly difficult skill to acquire, and thus, is worth lots of money. I don't see a good UX designer volunteering their time for an OS project, when there are many a profitable opportunities out there for them to exploit their skills.
ghempton 15y ago
Designers live in a different world. Unlike many developers, they depend on proprietary tools (Adobe) and don't interface directly with open source software in a contributive or decision making capacity.
danudey 15y ago
I couldn't help but notice that most (all?) of the projects he listed as good examples are open-source projects funded by companies. Magento, Firefox, Wordpress, PhoneGap; even jQTouch is maintained by an individual who does mobile consulting for a living. In this case, it's not a group of volunteers who are pitching in for a project, then someone putting together a website. The websites (and projects) in all of those cases are marketing a product that the creator of the website is making money off of (whether directly, though search revenue, consulting, etc).
Me1000 15y ago
Fortunately there are designers out there who are willing to help with OSS projects. Cappuccino is a great example of this. Sofa has made 3 versions of Aristo (our theme) for us; they also helped design many other open source apps. Even though Sofa is no longer around, there are many very good designers out there willing to help work on open source projects. You just have to ask.
b1daly 15y ago
On the topic of visual design and UX, these are two (not quite orthogonal) different domains. The area in which they meet, design that helps UX and UX that doesn't look off putting, is usually missed. IMO, software used by professionals can get away with poor graphic design as long as it provides high functionality and efficiency. For software intended for beginners or occasional users the graphic design needs to be stronger to encourage the user to keep trying!
makecheck 15y ago
Some investment in good UI is certainly nice. But it may not be clear to non-programmers just how much work good UIs can be (so it should be no surprise if volunteer projects don't spend the time). There are some fairly obvious tasks, like artwork and putting some thought into what the behaviors should be. There are less obvious things like the fact that huge side effects often pop up. How much time will you spend on artwork? Every version of Mac OS X looks different, so your custom widget may have 4 different looks and you just know you'll need a 5th next year. Maybe it's a cross-platform program. Maybe the entire thing needs to change depending on where in the world it will be used. And this doesn't even begin to look into issues with programming images (e.g. tracking the mouse inside odd shapes or figuring out how to render things at different window sizes). Setting UI behavior is also deceptively simple. It can take a very long time to be sure that you've thought of everything even if you're reproducing a variation of UI that's pretty standard already. You often interact with existing things, e.g. a window manager or mouse event system, and you can be seriously screwed if you find a deficiency in a dependency. What about when your entire framework breaks because you need a customization? (This seems to happen in Cocoa all the time.) For example, guess what: customizable toolbars and resize-from-any-edge come "for free" in standard windows but they are completely unavailable for custom windows. Some changes can look simple on paper and explode when you actually try to implement them. Nothing ruins a weekend like discovering that a simple change would break all kinds of tangentially-related UI elements that were already working. So what do you do...recreate half the OS yourself just so one piece of UI can be a little more interesting or appropriate to a task?

71 points by cobychapple 15y ago

There is an obvious reason for this, most of the well designed projects have financial backing (a company that consults around the product/library) and as such have the resources. They want the platform/app to succeed because they finically benefit. Good UX is good for business.

portentint 15y ago

It's all about time. You're writing an open-source project - I know SOME lucky folks get paid to do it, but not most - and you have to just get the damned thing working. Once you do, you have to go back to your job, or whatever else feeds your face. The UX has to wait. And wait. And wait.

vilya 15y ago
I think it's on a par with clean, well commented code: people with the right experience and know-how can do it as they go without any extra effort; others will need to go back and rework it to get to the same point - and that's time that they probably won't get. I guess I'm trying to be optimistic and say that it can be done, but it requires a certain amount of discipline.
tikhonj 15y ago
I don't think this is really the core issue. If you're not getting paid to work on an open source project, chances are you're doing it just because you simply love programming. You probably aren't an expert designer, and, more pertinently, you're probably more than happy with what you have. In my experience, building a UI makes you blind to its shortcomings. There are methods and procedures around this, but if you just love programming, chances are you don't know them. I found this out myself when I saw my dad struggle to use even a simple chess game I designed. When you've made something, you naturally know it inside-out; nobody else is going to have nearly that much experience with it.

munaf 15y ago

Generally, I agree with the article. But I've been seeing a lot of projects that lead me to believe developers are becoming more design-minded. Many new JS libraries, for example, are beautifully presented. My hunch has always been that GitHub is setting a trend for OSS developers to present content to each other in a clean and pretty way. Hopefully that extends to the apps they create.

aangjie 15y ago
+1 for GitHub... I think they are doing some good.. and would love to see that as a standard for UI design of open-source projects to follow. Though am not sure..

nknight 15y ago

Right now, GNOME is probably the last example you should cite as "getting it right" if you're trying to convince open source developers of something. GNOME's UI decisions of late are not particularly popular with the crowd you need to convince.

cobychapple 15y ago
I realise it hasn't been popular, and I'm not the biggest fan either, but my point isn't about what's popular amongst open source developers. Also, if developers need to be convinced of the need for good design I think that's a good example of the problem right there.
- nknight 15y ago
  You don't need to convince them of the need for good design, you need to convince them that what they're doing now isn't good design, and that they should do something different. I'm saying, citing the project they think is an example of bad design isn't going to help, your opinion will carry less weight.
uokesita 15y ago
I like to view it as, gnome at least do some 'renewals' and changes to their site and stuff, oposite as the other sites and software.
Jach 15y ago
I don't know about the author, but I think Gnome 2 is really the best desktop design out there. Gnome 3 on the other hand... I'd agree that right now it's not looking very good.

mikecsh 15y ago

Perhaps there is a difficulty in getting designers involved with open source software projects. As a freelance web developer you could overhaul a few of the promotional websites for the software you use and find poorly promoted. Perhaps better tools are needed to make it easier for designers to contribute - maybe this could be addressed in someoway by someone like Github.

naner 15y ago

Yes, we know. Since you're a designer why not offer your time to some open source project you use instead of just offering your criticism.

cobychapple 15y ago
You mean like I did for http://mentoring.is http://mentoring.is (as discussed here: http://blog.cobychapple.com/blog/2011/09/18/a-distributed-mentoring-movement/ http://blog.cobychapple.com/blog/2011/09/18/a-distributed-me...)?
- naner 15y ago
  No, I don't think so... isn't that just a page that says "hey, contact me if you want me to mentor you"? I meant reaching out to an open source project that you use in an effort to become a contributor.
  - cobychapple 15y ago
    Point taken. FWIW, helping with the mentoring.is page (albeit a small project) is what got me started about this whole topic. I've been talking with a couple of mentors (who are heavily involved in open source themselves) about how I can contribute to some of my favourite projects, and it's definitely something I plan to do as I get free time.
    - naner 15y ago
      Sounds good. Open source projects tend to be lacking non-programmer volunteers and the design aspect gets overlooked a lot. Hopefully you'll find some good projects that are receptive to outside design help. Sorry, I didn't quite grasp what you were implying earlier. I didn't realize that you were a fan of the mentoring.is project and then offered them your help (which is what I was encouraging you to do), I thought you had just set up a mentoring page for yourself (which seemed unrelated).
    - pinwale 15y ago

jdthomas 15y ago

I think this has a lot to do with not having to sell anything to anyone. OSS projects are, in general, less concerned with converting users than commercial software -- you like our project join us and use it else 'meh'. While, it would be nice to have a shinny surface on oss projects, I think it is unnecessary. As someone who recently (for work) switched from using Linux boxes to a MacBook Pro, I would generally take the less shiny functionality over the pretty pictures any day. (\cough\ keyboard shortcut to lock screen \cough\) :)

namank 15y ago
Ctrl+Shift+Eject. to turn off the screen. To lock it, set your laptop to it to lock after 5 secs and then use the above.
- jdthomas 15y ago
  HOLY CRAP!! Thank you! ... Wow, I must be retarded or not have looked hard enough as the second google result now shows that. :D Anyway Mucho gracias.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    Haven't you heard? Mac OS X is intuitive.
  - namank 15y ago
    yeah, no worries. its bit of a hack in itself. I don't get why Apple doesn't implement a more explicit shortcut...maybe because most of their hardware is laptop and with laptops most people probably shut the screen which locks the mac automatically? Who knows!
- jcromartie 15y ago
  And Command + Option + Eject to sleep it. Also, mouse hotcorners work.

namank 15y ago

A very fair point and I think this is mostly because we, as an industry/society, have only recently begun to pay attention to UX. I'm not going to buy arguments that say good software has (needs) enterprise backing. Open software, more often than not, follows well established industry trends. UX is only just becoming a trend. The same arguments that ten years ago applied to open software can today be applied to good UX. Thats that. Thats all there is to it. Give it time, it'll happen. Better yet, MAKE it happen...be the first one to revamp Cyberduck's interface.

omouse 15y ago

Unfortunately, the better UI doesn't mean a better product. Working with Magento for example has been a pain in different ways. It sure does look pretty though even when you're debugging things! ;-)

philjackson 15y ago

I made an effort with http://apiaxle.com http://apiaxle.com. Very much a work in progress...

schraeds 15y ago
Looks pretty good. I am a UI/UX designer and would love to help out for free to boost my portfolio. A few ideas.. Center large gear image on icon, move smaller to right a bit and reduce in size. Smooth out banding a bit on metal texture. Change button text from "Try it Now" to something like "Download Now", "Learn More", "Get Started" or a combination of the above. Current button seems like free trial and might scare some users off vs being free. Email in my profile if you want to talk more!
- philjackson 15y ago
  Thanks, schraeds. The idea was that people would pay for my support/development so I would like people to suspect a certain degree of 'commercialness' which is why I chose 'try it now'.

rhlee 15y ago

This reminds me of what David Siegel (creator of Gnome Do & Docky) said once at a Ubuntu Developer Summit. Each open source project should have a design advocate whose sole role is constantly make sure that as much though goes into usability as the code.

_dps 15y ago

I think a large source of the UX quality gap for volunteer-driven Open Source products is the grossly underestimated cost of getting good UX. I submit (without proof) that volunteer Open Source efforts are great at competing on easily quantified dimensions (foos per cycle, feature parity) and not-as-great at competing on dimensions that take anything other than free time and a computer to evaluate. It's very expensive to truly evaluate UX quality of complex products, except at a bare minimum level of "can users do what they want without being harassed". Measuring UX quality means finding the common appeal in a potentially large and heterogeneous group (as a heuristic: the more heterogeneous the audience's tastes, the less satisfying volunteer-based solutions tend to be). To find the common appeal in a large heterogeneous group you have to interact with a lot of people and measure them repeatedly because people's tastes for complex products is not something that can be well-modeled by point-in-time measurements (e.g. it took me a few weeks to discover my MacBook's 4-finger touchpad gestures). Apache is an excellent competitor in the web server market (very narrow, highly technical audience). GIMP has a decent, but not huge following (somewhat broader audience, but still specialists). Open/Libre Office, GNUmeric, and GNUcash are not going to replace their commercial competitors any time soon.

bluekeybox 15y ago
> To find the common appeal in a large heterogeneous group you have to interact with a lot of people and measure them repeatedly because people's tastes for complex products is not something that can be well-modeled Or you could just go out and hire a good designer. Your comment just illustrates the problem why a lot of computer geeks don't get taste: they assume it's something you go out and measure. Any good designer will tell you: you do not measure taste and design for two simple reasons: (1) public taste is constantly changing, and (2) as soon as you can measure something, it's outdated. I call it the Heisenberg uncertainty of taste. If you go to the trouble of polling 10 million people, you will be 3 years behind; measuring the opinion of 100 million individuals will set you back 6 years behind the curve or maybe more. The kind of minimalistic web design that is commonly seen right now and which Facebook, Apple, Google, and others use was hot among the designer circles about seven years ago. If you tried measuring public taste at that time, you would get a result sheet listing PHP.net as "the" design to copy. You don't measure good design, you define it by producing something that's good and usable in some basic aspects yet not seen before and interesting in others.

thinker 15y ago

I've been thinking about this situation myself this last month and wanted to help give back to the OSS community as a designer/front-end developer - but I didn't know where to start. I'm considering building a simple matchmaking site that lets open source project developers request for design/front-end help and for designers/front-enders to offer up their time as well. Would anyone be interested in this if I built it or has this already been done?

cobychapple 15y ago
I think this would be a great project!
mcantelon 15y ago
Great idea. Haven't heard of this being done.

SeanLuke 15y ago

To see what's wrong with UIs, we need look no further than X. Consider the myriad of UIs which run on X, many of which aren't compatible with one another: starting with Athena, through Motif widgets, through competing Gnome and KDE, GNUStep, and so on. There must be dozens of major toolkits historically. What caused this mess? Openness and the hacker nature did. A UI needs a bully: someone who says that you will do text fields this way, and if you don't like it, tough. Consistency is absolutely crucial in a successful UI. In Windows, the bully is Microsoft. In OS X the bully is Apple. Open systems by their very nature don't have a single dictator. A UI also needs a bully to force simpler designs. X is replete with applications that have every single possible configuration option. It's part of the tradition. The problem is that this makes the applications extraordinarily unfriendly to the 99% of the population who want to get work done, in favor of the 1% hackers who like to tweak. It's a rare X application which doesn't suffer from this malady: indeed X does itself. There's no one to tell these application designers that their propeller-hats are screwed on too tight. I don't know if there is a way to fix this. Simplicity and consistency are the two most important features of a UI, and the open nature of Linux, X, etc. simply run against them. When a bully arrives to the Linux world (such as Google in Android) you start seeing quality again. Without it, you wind up with Maemo.

philjr 15y ago
More of a benevolent dictator really
saucerful 15y ago
> Consider the myriad of UIs which run on X, many of which aren't compatible with one another If you are referring to window toolkits, they are all compatible in the sense that you can run different ones side-by-side. If you are referring to window managers, you only need one. If you are referring to a consistent look, the two major ones (GTK and Qt) each have themes which render their widgets in the other toolkit (GTK-Qt and QGtkStyle, respectively). I can vouch for GTK-Qt. It works.
- jebblue 15y ago
  Totally agree, UI's do not need to be overseen by an overlord of design. I can right now start up a KDE app or a Gnome app and they happily co-exist. Try to pull of something like that on oh Windows, Mac or Android. At least I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on those OS's.

the_mat 15y ago

"most of these sites look stuck in a much older paradigm of thinking about web design" This needs some explanation. The vim site looks dated, but clearly I'm not enough of an insidery web guy to know why some of these sites are stuck in a much older paradigm. In fact, I'm kind of lost on the purpose of the entire rant. UI is important? Is that the takeway? Why even write an article about that?

Jach 15y ago
If the vim site is outdated, so is Amazon's. (Okay, Amazon's less so, but I think the taste issue is more from the tabular layout than the lack of gradients or rollovers. Just my thoughts though.) vim itself has a fantastic UX. As for the rant, I think people need to be reminded of such obvious things quite often. "What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It's overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball." -Jerry Cleaver
- DanBC 15y ago
  The Amazon site is just hideous on so many different levels. Just awful. As well as looking not great it's hard to use and some aspects (search) are broken. The Vim site looks a bit dated, but it serves its purpose. I can't really comment without seeing someone do a makeover. When I'm looking for information I prefer a bunch of nicely marked up text rather than snippets of text scattered over various shiny image heavy pages. The Vim website even tells people how to get involved with making it better - (http://vimonline.sourceforge.net/ http://vimonline.sourceforge.net/)

reledi 15y ago

I agree that UI in FOSS is often terrible, but as munaf mentions below, developers are becoming more design-minded and it's slowly changing. It's hard to get designers to contribute to FOSS, I don't know why. A lot of developers simply don't care or do care but don't know enough about design to do a great job (I fall in the latter category but I think I'm quickly improving). The recent trend is that FOSS projects want to have good UI, but they need help. Designers don't need be involved with a specific FOSS project, they can for example create beautiful icons and openly release them. Toolkits such as Bootstrap by Twitter and Foundation by ZURB have been a big help.

lazerwalker 15y ago
I think what's tough is that FOSS design generally ends up as design by committee, with a tendency towards introducing more configurability (and thus more complexity) as a means of appeasing everyone when dissension arises. From an engineering standpoint, that's part of what makes FOSS great. From a design standpoint, that sounds like a gig from hell.

swanson 15y ago

I've always wondered why designers don't point to open source as a portfolio like some developers do. As a developer, I would imagine that there aren't many better ways to land a job at a tech company than designing a logo or brand identity for a cool open source project. There is no shortage of projects on github that don't even have something as simple as a logo or an About page. To me, seeing a portfolio of tech-related material sure beats 25 brochure-style sites for a local winery or wedding photographer.

chii 15y ago
"designing a logo or brand identity for a cool open source project. " a logo or a brand does not a good UI make. What you need is indepth research and intuition into what a user "feels" at home with - especially with programs targeted at the non-technical user. This is an amazingly difficult skill to acquire, and thus, is worth lots of money. I don't see a good UX designer volunteering their time for an OS project, when there are many a profitable opportunities out there for them to exploit their skills.

ghempton 15y ago

Designers live in a different world. Unlike many developers, they depend on proprietary tools (Adobe) and don't interface directly with open source software in a contributive or decision making capacity.

danudey 15y ago

I couldn't help but notice that most (all?) of the projects he listed as good examples are open-source projects funded by companies. Magento, Firefox, Wordpress, PhoneGap; even jQTouch is maintained by an individual who does mobile consulting for a living. In this case, it's not a group of volunteers who are pitching in for a project, then someone putting together a website. The websites (and projects) in all of those cases are marketing a product that the creator of the website is making money off of (whether directly, though search revenue, consulting, etc).

Me1000 15y ago

Fortunately there are designers out there who are willing to help with OSS projects. Cappuccino is a great example of this. Sofa has made 3 versions of Aristo (our theme) for us; they also helped design many other open source apps. Even though Sofa is no longer around, there are many very good designers out there willing to help work on open source projects. You just have to ask.

b1daly 15y ago

On the topic of visual design and UX, these are two (not quite orthogonal) different domains. The area in which they meet, design that helps UX and UX that doesn't look off putting, is usually missed. IMO, software used by professionals can get away with poor graphic design as long as it provides high functionality and efficiency. For software intended for beginners or occasional users the graphic design needs to be stronger to encourage the user to keep trying!

makecheck 15y ago

Some investment in good UI is certainly nice. But it may not be clear to non-programmers just how much work good UIs can be (so it should be no surprise if volunteer projects don't spend the time). There are some fairly obvious tasks, like artwork and putting some thought into what the behaviors should be. There are less obvious things like the fact that huge side effects often pop up. How much time will you spend on artwork? Every version of Mac OS X looks different, so your custom widget may have 4 different looks and you just know you'll need a 5th next year. Maybe it's a cross-platform program. Maybe the entire thing needs to change depending on where in the world it will be used. And this doesn't even begin to look into issues with programming images (e.g. tracking the mouse inside odd shapes or figuring out how to render things at different window sizes). Setting UI behavior is also deceptively simple. It can take a very long time to be sure that you've thought of everything even if you're reproducing a variation of UI that's pretty standard already. You often interact with existing things, e.g. a window manager or mouse event system, and you can be seriously screwed if you find a deficiency in a dependency. What about when your entire framework breaks because you need a customization? (This seems to happen in Cocoa all the time.) For example, guess what: customizable toolbars and resize-from-any-edge come "for free" in standard windows but they are completely unavailable for custom windows. Some changes can look simple on paper and explode when you actually try to implement them. Nothing ruins a weekend like discovering that a simple change would break all kinds of tangentially-related UI elements that were already working. So what do you do...recreate half the OS yourself just so one piece of UI can be a little more interesting or appropriate to a task?