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After the GNOME 3 disaster, it's understandable why many developers within the open source community have become skeptical of designers and their contributions.

After the GNOME 3 disaster, it's understandable why many developers within the open source community have become skeptical of designers and their contributions. Within a single release cycle, these designers managed to destroy what was once among the most vibrant of all open source projects. The existing GNOME users have been alienated by the absolutely horrible UI. Among their ranks were many good developers and other contributors, too, whose absence now prevents the project from recovering. A large portion of these users moved on to KDE or Xfce, rather than MATE, causing further harm to the GNOME project and community. There are other cases, too. Windows 8 and the UI changes starting with Firefox 4 are other recent, and major, examples of the work of designers going terribly wrong. The end result is software that is nearly unusable, or much less usable than previous versions. The skepticism you describe is very well earned and deserved.

takluyver 14y ago
This neatly illustrates another problem with redesigning popular software: no matter how much time you spend, no matter how beautiful you make the design, the people who're already using it are used to its current layout, and don't care about learning a new interface. If you could give people a completely fresh, unprejudiced choice between Gnome 2 & 3, Windows 7 & 8, or Firefox 3.5 & 18, I bet many of them would choose the newer version. I don't think (most of) these UI decisions are objectively bad, and over the long run they might even pay off. But when the user upgrades and suddenly can't see how to make it Frobnicate, they get angry.
- xradionut 14y ago
  After you've learned hundreds of interfaces over 3 decades, you learn that newer can be, but isn't always better. So when I see YAIR, (Yet Another Interface Redesign), I get a case of deja poo, (I have seen this shit before).

takluyver 14y ago

This neatly illustrates another problem with redesigning popular software: no matter how much time you spend, no matter how beautiful you make the design, the people who're already using it are used to its current layout, and don't care about learning a new interface. If you could give people a completely fresh, unprejudiced choice between Gnome 2 & 3, Windows 7 & 8, or Firefox 3.5 & 18, I bet many of them would choose the newer version. I don't think (most of) these UI decisions are objectively bad, and over the long run they might even pay off. But when the user upgrades and suddenly can't see how to make it Frobnicate, they get angry.

xradionut 14y ago
After you've learned hundreds of interfaces over 3 decades, you learn that newer can be, but isn't always better. So when I see YAIR, (Yet Another Interface Redesign), I get a case of deja poo, (I have seen this shit before).