this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago (4 children)

In FOSS most people can program, but only a hand full of people can design a decent UI.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I always wondered if I could contribute/volunteer to a FOSS somehow with some UIX stuff, but I don't even know where to start. Would you just draw a concept ui for the team to work out or something?

Not that I'm great at it, but man, we gotta start somewhere, right?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

This is probably common. The people that work on UI often aren't the people who do pull requests. But I think if you want to contribute it would be best to get in touch with a maintainer on the chat of the project. Projects often have a matrix/irc/discord on the git page.

[–] bitfucker 7 points 6 months ago

I think you can start a figma or other collaborative UI/UX as an idea first. If a developer is interested in implementing it, then you move on to the next feature

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

There's also two main plus one lesser issue that are less commonly discussed:

  1. Lack of manpower. FOSS devs often doing it as a side project on top of some other and/or a full-time job, so that even lowers one's ability of concentrate on stuff like the UI, when you're already working hard on fixing bugs, looking up things (which is getting harder and harder thanks to AI slop - I once managed to destroy a Linux on my Raspberry Pi while trying to adjust the path variables).
  2. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable parts of your application. There are many times I haven't noticed a a very uncomfortable part of my GUI after months of use, then I had to refactor things, which obviously took time away from other things. This also affects the users already in the userbase.

Elitism is also a factor. A lot of people like the feeling of being part of a special group, and for them, the steep learning curve is a feature, not a bug. I've seen Blender users being angry at the devs for "spoonfeeding" the normies, and letting in all kinds of people. Also just look at OP's image.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This never ceases to amaze me.

My old best friend and I used to be a programming tag team that worked pretty well; he'd slap together w semi-functional version of the idea we had and then id go in and make the UI make sense and fix all the logic bugs and typos.

I'm not saying I'm some perfect UI guru or anything but the way he (and other people I've met) seem to have no internal base knowledge of shit like "similar settings probably shouldn't go on completely opposite sides of the screen under different menus" or "5-deep nested drop-down menus hurt people's souls"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Honestly I still struggle a lot with this. I can click around a UI and feel what might confuse a user, but building a UI from scratch feels like such a shot in the dark.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

So, why do UI people not use and contribute to FOSS then? Are they all on Mac? Then go complain to them or contribute your desired UI improvements. FOSS isn't an all you can eat buffet.

Personally, I think UI people are less idealistic and I do look down on them for that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

It's super hard to get involved as a UI person. If you're a developer, you can just rock up to a project and fix bugs, and if you follow the coding style they'll probably get accepted.

If you want to successfully contribute as a UI person you have to convince a bunch of developers that you know what they should be doing better than they do. It basically never happens.