I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes <i>good enough</i>, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free.<p>But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are <i>awful</i> at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.<p>So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to <i>technically</i> be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.<p>Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
> but are awful at UX<p>This is such a weird trope.<p>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.
"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person".<p>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.<p>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)
Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.<p>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.<p>An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply <i>depends</i> on who we are designing <i>for</i>.<p>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.<p>Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
> This is such a weird trope.<p>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.
Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
Gimp may be a bitnof a bad example nowadays? Of course depends on your habits and standards.
Actually, I like Microsoft Teams.<p>I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.
Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.
Teams are decent, wdym?<p>Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
> 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.<p>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.
We should consider public funding for open source projects.<p>Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.
I think it's an issue of "what matters".<p>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.
And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...
It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube.<p>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 <i>the</i> DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the <i>only</i> 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.<p>[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it.<p>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.
>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory.<p>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.<p>Krita is another example of a good project<p>CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools).<p>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.<p>The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.<p>(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces.<p>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.
> To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple<p>The interface doesn't have to be <i>simple</i>. 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.
GIMP fought against single window mode for ages despite the majority of people wanting it.
I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain <i>weird</i>. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.
Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero.<p>What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
Almost no one is being paid to make desktop apps any longer. And the UI/X discipline did not make it to the web for whatever reason. The last gasps settled on more padding, rounded corners, and hidden scrollbars. Most of which are pretty but counterproductive. Dead except for very large products.
Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves.<p>Somewhat relevant XKCD: <a href="https://xkcd.com/1172/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1172/</a>
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random.<p>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).<p>There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).