You can't "skill issue" yourself out from every situation

The open source music notation software MuseScore used to be really, really bad. A musician and UX designer gave it a scathing review in a humorous YouTube video. And then the company behind MuseScore hired that YouTuber and spent a lot of effort doing a major redesign, and now it's actually quite good.

All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren't the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.

I was prepared to hear the story that the youtuber got sued into oblivion for defamation. Glad to hear they actually worked on improving it instead
Love tentacrul. I re-watch that video from time to time just because it's so good. It was also really funny watching a later video of his where he just casually dropped that he was working on musescore.
- I want him to do FreeCAD.
- That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it's hard to go past the Sibelius one if I'm gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.
Blender's UI overhaul from 2.7 to 2.8 was a much needed and very welcome update as well
I was a happy MuseScore user before and after the UI changes. So this post brings to mind questions that usually float in my mind:
When I can happily use a thing whose UX is criticized: is it just because I don't know any better alternatives, or because I've spent so long with it that of course I know how to work it? Or is the UX really not that bad? Or is it that there are often general solutions for most of the population, but sometimes some people take really well to things that work poorly for others and vice versa? Is it that the hated parts are bits I do not touch much in my workflow, so of course I see no problems because I am not interacting with the problem parts?
When I have difficulty using a thing whose UX is praised or has no criticism: is it because I am smoothbrained? That I just have not had enough time trying to figure it out, so of course I struggle and just need to apply myself more? Is it something that works for most, but it will not work for everyone? Am I in a really niche use case with bad UX that nobody else has bothered to complain about?
I do not have enough UX knowledge to criticize or make objective evaluations here. I only have how easy it is for me to navigate applications. Though I would like to work on gaining it someday, especially so I can help out FOSS targets of "bad UX" complaints.
- I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can't comment from extensive personal experience.
  But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I'm sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.
  As a general rule, a good UX should:
  Make it very, very easy to do (or discover how to do) the most common basic things, and should result in them being done in the way a user expects
  Not slow down a power user from accomplishing basic tasks at speed
  Allow easy discovery of and access to less common tasks
  A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.
This is a huge victory, the big takeaway for me is that the person who smack talked the software was willing to get in the room with the designers and help them out. It's easy to complain, it's a lot more work to complain, run through user tests, file bug reports, etc. So bravo to that person, and hopefully we can see this sort of outcome on more software.

There's a quote along the lines of "User error is not a thing, the system allowed for the error through bad design"

Which can be true depending on how far you stretch it. I'd say that if a chunk of the user base is having a problem, it's a design problem

I recently had a case at work where you could move an object by holding the left mouse button and delete it with the right mouse button. If you deleted it while moving, you got an error message and the program would crash. It was an easy fix but afterwards I had a one hour discussion with our usability engineers if what I had fixed was a bug (my opinion) or a user error (theirs).
- That one's easy. Is the crash part of the program's design?
  If not: It's an implementation bug, the program is not behaving as intended.
  If yes: It's a design bug, crashes shouldn't be intended behavior.
- They were holding it wrong, obviously.
God really should get on that and fix the design issues with humans
- I dunno, if we're really designed in that dudes image then I wouldn't trust him at all personally.
But IMO that's one reason weird UX/design is not uncommon and can persist in dev ecosystems. The intended users are more proficient than average and most are able to work around most issues.

You can't "skill issue" yourself out from every situation

If you can't do that - that's a skill issue tbh.

I was about to post this and just thought I should check if someone else had got to it first.

Users: I demand OSS devs and Maintainers do X

OSS Devs/Maintainers: Are you willing to contribute code or at least donate any money?

Users: Uhh its OSS, you should just do all the work for free with no funding. Also I demand that your software be as polished and complete as (premium proprietary software) I demand you do X, I demand you do Y, because im entitled to free software.

I am sympathetic but also so damn tired of seeing what essentially translates to:
"Look, [megacorpo] bought out my school's ecosystem so that's all I learned. It's "industry standard", I can't believe this FOSS can't even do this one niche corporate-job feature, therefore it's objectively terrible / not ready / inferior / useless for job work."
Which can usually be further boiled down to:
"I tried it but it wasn't a carbon copy of my preferred corpo-ware without any strings attached so it basically sucks."
- Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven't touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.
OSS: Why do so few people use our softwaree!? It's literally free!

And here I am trying to convince my sales team that supporting a workflow where users run our app with sudo is a bad idea.

cough Inkscape cough ...

Why are y'all looking at me like that?

- There's no cad somewhere on this planet with good UX.
- FreeCAD has improved a lot though with the 1.0 update.
Inkscape's UX is horrendous. Looks alright, but it's unusable garbage.
I thought it was just me! I've been using Inkscape for a long time now and I always feel I'm wrestling with the damn thing. I understand the principles behind vectors but I'll be damned if I can consistently achieve what I'm attempting to accomplish.
- Not sure if Inkscape works the same, but this game helped me when I was struggling with drawing curves in Adobe Illustrator.

I like GTK and it's really simple to make good looking functional UI with GTK4, but apparently people have a hate boner for anything good looking, GTK or Gnome related

From what I've heard about it, it's because the default gtk style only fits in with gnome, and gtk4 made it really difficult to customise it and is also really buggy on anything not gnome.
That's what I've heard anyway, I'm not a distro dev and the distro I last used is still on gtk3
- Nowadays "buggy" is not how I'd describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.
  However it's still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it's inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK "design" choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!
From what I've heard from devs who touched GTK/Gnome, that iskind of caused by the GTK devs.
GTK is the better looking girl at the sock hop. QT's dress is a little ratty and she's still got that lazy eye.
QT has a certain "Ah that's good enough for now, I'll fix it later" feel to it, while GTK makes things that look done. It's such a shame they wasted all that potential making something as rectal puke as Gnome out of it.
- Gnome is good, their extension system is ass but I love the rest of Gnome

This sadly excludes the majority of bad UX decisions that are done entirely to maximize users time inside of the app as well as display advertising.

So many functional apps are destroyed by these incentives. There is literally a "skill issue" but in the opposite direction. The design is either purposely malicious in a subtle way with "dark patterns" (something Amazon is insanely guilty of. Literally just go try and return and item.) or is purposely annoying trying to ensure the user purchases the "free trial" to actually make the app functional. Knowing a lot of users will be charged at least once for the free trial.

I guess my point is that there is so so so so much wrong with UX design today. But for the majority of people that's not because of a bad programmer with no design knowledge. It's on purpose in most cases.

Well, yes, just not on the users side.

But it is a skill issue, just UI/UX design skill. Not software development skill.

people always mention blender when talking about good ux in open source software, but i feel like the godot game engine doesn't get enough love. it's miles above of unity in terms of intuitiveness for me personally. plus it's entirely customisable since it's built in godot itself.

Godot is something I can still be super newb at and yet straight up admire. The nodes tree / scene system is a work of genius and I love it so much.
I do feel like a lot of inspector bits suffer from unintuitive "hard to distinguish menu to sub-sub-sub-sub menu" UX, but I think the editor's "expand all inspector headings" (or something) option is really handy for knowing what you're working with, and mitigates that a little.
Remember when selecting something was done with the right mouse button in blender. That was great UX for beginners.

Every Microsoft product.

But also Gimp.

Linux desktop zealots summed up in one meme. Perfection.

Engineers don't let engineers design interfaces.

smh skill issue

Point not made. First time around I read this as "elitist devs looking down on other devs thinking the latter can't figure out a good UX", which instantly gets countered with "it is a skill issue alright, but with all the people who design to UX to be exactly that (looking at you too, Android)"

Ok, so this is about devs making software on their own and producing bad UX? Wow, news flash: most devs, even good ones, are not good UI/UX designers, that's a completely different skill

I don't think this is right. It's more like:

This software is so obscenely powerful that UX is irrelevant. If you want that power, you are going to learn how to use it. We're too busy making the software powerful to waste time making it accessible to people who can't be bothered expending the effort.

This is especially relevant in open-source. It's free software bro. Pick two ONLY: Free, Easy, Powerful

Counterpoint: Blender, once they stopped trying to dismiss critique of its formerly godawful UX as a "skill issue". I even saw Blender users looking into alternatives the moment Blender wasn't awful to use, because they no longer could be special little snowflakes for using a piece of software, as "normies" started to "invade" their community.
- Man it took me like 3 years to get over myself and just re-learn Blender 2.8 but eventually it clicked and new blender is way better. I still have to go into settings and tick 'Select All toggles', set Select to Right mouse button and rebind focus to Q. No amount of brute force is gonna make me enjoy the new behavior for those functions, it only gets in my way.
- blender is obviously an exception, they have the resources to do it. the vast majority of projects this post is about do not.
  if people want to feel special for using difficult software, that's dumb, but that's not why the software is difficult.
  "the exception proves the rule" and so on
- UX only people who are willing to read the manual understand*
  i learned pretty much everything about the vast majority of tools i use on a daily basis literally just by reading the manual. i know that attention span, and well, literacy are both high bars but if I can do it you can too.