But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.
Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
This is such a weird trope.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work.
It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this.
I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.
It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue.
In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.
That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.
Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good.
The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes.
IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.
[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too.
Krita is another example of a good project
CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.
Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.
Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.
By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux.
The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.
(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist.
Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs.
It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.
The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).
There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).
It'd be like saying "Man the internet has been on such an upwards trajectory since HTML" in 2000 ;D
Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
particularly is my all time favorite.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/deprecation-and-removal-of-mac...
Personally, I'd love to see some more focus on game-dev workflows. The game asset pipeline still feels janky: texture painting exists, but not great, and baking textures/previewing results or baking from high poly to low poly involves a lot of manual node fiddling and rewiring. Export/iterate/build/test cycles are also pretty painful still.
But check out this collaboration between Blender and Godot https://godotengine.org/showcase/dogwalk/ I could imagine that in the not too distant future we might really have a completely open tools stack for making up to AA games (minus console SDKs which always are under NDA I guess).
It's the lowest priority of job for the hiring team and the role is normally forgotten about once the hire has been onboarded.
I worked for an animation studio and they didn't take down roles.
$240k "Press release, tech blogpost, dedicated product manager for your area" https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
Meta are paying $30k per year, which is crazy really, when you think how much Blender has assisted in getting content onto their platform. Nvidia is better at $120k, but again, think how many graphics card buys Blender cycles has driven.
Maya is frozen in time, and that is not necessarily a bad thing...
Great video on getting 3D render preview speeds up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0GW8Na5CIE
Geometry nodes tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos
Blender still needs plugins to be functional for content:
https://tinynocky.gumroad.com/l/tinyeye
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary
https://flipfluids.gumroad.com/l/flipfluids
https://artell.gumroad.com/l/auto-rig-pro
https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/l/ahwvli
https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender
https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/
Recommended training (Some artists like it, and some don't ymmv):
1. (A) Complete Blender Creator: Learn 3D Modelling for Beginners
https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/
* Basics of low-poly design in blender
2. (B+) Blender Animation & Rigging: Bring Your Creations To Life
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-animation-rigging/
* Some more practice rigging
* Export to game engine teaser
3. (B) The Ultimate Blender 3D Sculpting Course
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-3d-sculpting-course/
* Sculpting, Retopology, and VDM brushes
* a few outdated examples, and annoying instruction style
* basic anatomy
* covers several workflows
* Instructor is inexperienced
4. (A+) The Ultimate Blender 3D Simulations, Physics & Particles
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-simulations-physics-par...
* Shader/Texture basics
* Geometry node basics
* Boid sprites
* Hair and physics simulation
* Camera FX, and post-render filters
* Focused on Blender v4.3
* Instructions on how to export your assets to Unity 3D and Unreal game engines
Devs stil run the show, and it can be a huge effort to convince them to change course on something. People were complaining about the mouse controls for years and it took until 2.8 to finally convince the org otherwise to adapt a more typical workflow.
It's a rough balance because the other extreme is artists making unrealistic demands based on how the system is architected (or worse, the deceptively simole: https://xkcd.com/1425/). So I don't really have a solution.
"Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms."
Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.
That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses to make content either!
So now you've got a decent pool of enthusiastic kids flowing into education with pre-existing Blender knowledge. And Blender is good enough for educational purposes, so as long as it doesn't significantly hamper the students post-education it is very attractive for educators to adopt as well - why bother with all the hassle of getting educational licenses when you can just download it for free?
The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.
I was with you up until this part. I was a DVD programmer for years on the de facto standard software which was very expensive and cumbersome for some people to use. Then Apple released DVD Studio Pro which did a lot of abstraction layer simplification for people, but also meant that something could not be done in that software that could be on the big boy package. I know it's an apple/orange situation, but there are times where there's a reason for the cheaper/free price tag. I haven't paid attention to the capabilities of Maya/Blender for nearly a decade, but I'm guessing there are still things that can be done in Maya that cannot be done in Blender.
As mentioned the responsibility tends to have been subsumed by designers, but believe few designers study HCI. Part of the reason interfaces get harder to use every year.
For example, the Topological Naming Problem (as I understand it) is made quite bad due to OpenCASCADE design - but as we've seen with 0.19 and later it is possible in a lot of cases to work around that. But that's a lot of really hard work with relatively little reward, so for years it languished on the backlog, and users had to deal with even trivial designs randomly blowing up in their face for no clear reason.
The result is a CAD program filled with footguns. Nobody wants to address structural issues, so you just pretend they don't exist, hide a half-baked tutorial on a Wiki on how to work around the worst of them, and blame the user for holding it wrong.
Commercial applications can solve this by shoveling copious amounts of cash at any skilled developer who is able to make any real-world improvement - even when it's not a perfect solution yet. FLOSS applications have to wait for a developer to come around who is masochistic enough to tackle it for free.
Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!
It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming infrastructure. People come to depend on tools made by people without the resources, interest, or personality to run an infrastructure project, or who won't budge on their vision to allow contributions outside of it that might help get the project to a point where it can attract enough vision-aligned contributors.
Forking potentially shifts the problem to a new triad, so it's not an obvious solution in all cases.
I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.
The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.
Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Good to hear. I use GIMP pretty seldomly and that was always the first menu option I had to hunt down.
OSS's UI is subsidized by commercial software.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source...
Product & framework thinkers: Case studies.
https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...
The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.
Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.
For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.
Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.
Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it.
Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week
It now has an ellipse tool, but finding it among the toolbars and menus is left as an exercise for the reader