Great UX review!
Author mentions “designers and developers”, I get the suspicion that there’s no designer involved. At least no UX designer.
Do open source projects, even most notable like this one, ever employ UX designers?
From experience trying to contribute UX expertise to open source, I always end up finding out that the developer considers it their reward to have freedom to make UI decisions and shape UI fit their personal taste.
I try to demonstrate and make prototypes and compelling examples and arguments, but since usually the UX problem we trying to fix is in something that’s already implemented, there’s little will to make those changes, when there’s 100s of issues that can be worked on in that time.
And yes, I end up learning WXwidgets or whatever programming framework used, in order to contribute the UXUI changes, knowing that pull request may not ever be accepted for reasons that’s again someone’s personal taste overrules UX.
There is a misguided culture of treating UX decisions like programming algorithms decisions: as long it’s possible to get user from A to B, developer allowed to play around and invent different ways and optimisations.
You can’t treat UX is such way. UX is a different skill set. To take a Car analogy, it’s letting engine designer make decisions about car body and aerodynamics. Mechanic would design every car as F1 because obviously to them it’s the fastest car and easy for them to use with 80 buttons on steering wheel. And then you see the their F1 car design and it’s “Homer” car.
Do open source projects, even most notable like this one, ever employ UX designers?
From experience trying to contribute UX expertise to open source, I always end up finding out that the developer considers it their reward to have freedom to make UI decisions and shape UI fit their personal taste.
I try to demonstrate and make prototypes and compelling examples and arguments, but since usually the UX problem we trying to fix is in something that’s already implemented, there’s little will to make those changes, when there’s 100s of issues that can be worked on in that time.
And yes, I end up learning WXwidgets or whatever programming framework used, in order to contribute the UXUI changes, knowing that pull request may not ever be accepted for reasons that’s again someone’s personal taste overrules UX.
There is a misguided culture of treating UX decisions like programming algorithms decisions: as long it’s possible to get user from A to B, developer allowed to play around and invent different ways and optimisations.
You can’t treat UX is such way. UX is a different skill set. To take a Car analogy, it’s letting engine designer make decisions about car body and aerodynamics. Mechanic would design every car as F1 because obviously to them it’s the fastest car and easy for them to use with 80 buttons on steering wheel. And then you see the their F1 car design and it’s “Homer” car.