6 ms·

Seems like a great product, but something about the URL is reminiscent of those scammy websites that try to trick you into downloading scamware.

DrewADesign 4y ago
I'm admittedly a hammer seeing everything as a nail, but as a designer, I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic, unnecessary branding and usability oversights. Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work any more than designers should expect themselves to be able to make scalable, reliable, maintainable, production-ready code. It's a specialty for a reason! Incorporating designers into FOSS projects from the beginning seems like a no-brainer, but design is nearly universally considered a superficial matter to be considered once the real work of back-end development is done (which is generally never.) It's one of the reason that open source alternatives will remain the alternatives rather than the standards. Good design takes a lot of up-front work, and once you get ignored or bikeshedded into oblivion with one design proposal, the liklihood of doing it again is pretty much zero. Definitely my white whale, but it kills me to see so many great projects that could have so much more impact if they enfranchised specialists to design the look and feel.
- waboremo 4y ago
  One of the great difficulty of tackling that problem is often FOSS projects are averse to design decisions like that made by someone relatively fresh to the project - even if the problem is incredibly obvious to the designers and not the core development team. You would have to spend a lot of time gaining trust to then be able to present an idea like switching domains. The duality of putting off design decisions until later, and also feeling like your current design is extremely personal (I've seen some projects where the maintainer immediately disregards a lot of proposals design wise because it's "good enough", as if that person just called their baby ugly), can make trying to make any progress on FOSS project feel horrible. It's a very interesting problem space I feel. There's so much room for improvement.
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    As a professional designer who's spent more time in my life developing FOSS than designing, I generally see FOSS projects refusing to accept design input, period. I've thought a lot about why and I see two broad problems: First, developers have a different fundamental perspective on interfaces than most people. They view interfaces as a wrapper that you use to interact with the important part: the application. To regular users, the interface is the application. I can't tell you how many times I've seen things like customizable color themes or ill-conceived typeface changes be the primary product of a developer-initiated "UX review," largely because they didn't know how to identify actual usability problems and wouldn't know how to craft solutions even if they did. If it persists long enough, maintainers don't just see their interfaces and user paths as flawed but good enough: they assume the mitigation techniques they've developed to work around a bad interface are best practices. Second, art school freshmen subconsciously trying to prove their competence to themselves give the harshest and least useful critique and often take constructive critique as a personal affront. That phenomenon seems generalizable: critique about things we're less confident in makes us feel more insecure than critique of things we're more confident in. If someone proposed replacing a core piece of the architecture with something different, they'd be confident enough to look at it and rationally decide if it's beneficial. Conversely, when developers see redesign proposals about interfaces they were never confident in to begin with, they get defensive, and design proposals get dismissed or bikeshedded to complete buggery. I think these two things imbue the FOSS development world with indifference to, or even distrust of designers. You only need to briefly look at threads on HN focused on design or interface to see the open disdain many developers have for designers. "Ruined by designers" is a pretty common refrain. Despite our unicorn reputations, I know lots of designers/developers, and every one that I can recall at the moment contribute to FOSS... just never as designers because the process is so irritating. Myself included. It's just not worth the amount of work that goes into a competent design proposal, noting that I would implement it personally, only to have it summarily dismissed by people with false confidence in their analysis.
    - hyperman1 4y ago
      Let me respond as a developer with admittedly no taste at all, who both committed and fixed plenty of atrocities: Just like security, design is one of these things where snake oil salesmen are everywhere, to the point that finding a good one without becoming a designer yourself is hard. I also notice you identify as an artist, not a psychologist, which seems the wrong approach to me. So what will happen if I let designers loose on my program? They might have real insight and improve things a lot. Or maybe they'll go all artsy and put lipstick on the pig, leaving me with an even worse program in lovely pastels? Or maybe they'll dumb down an interface in an attempt to create a granny-safe rocket launch pad, leaving the actual rocket engineers frustrated? Or they'll just move stuff around for the sake of moving stuff around, creating a lot of busywork and forcing user retraining without any upside. I've seen all these things happen. So what is your advise to this dev? How do I get designers that actually improve the design?
- counttheforks 4y ago
  > Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being pigeonholed, you know? > I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic, unnecessary branding and usability oversights. It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute.
  - codexon 4y ago
    Speaking as someone who was mainly a "developer" for a while, one frequent problem I see from developers is that they assume they can excel at everything because they are good at coding. Since coding is a hard task that not everyone can do well, they think this talent applies to everything else. Just a few weeks ago on here, there was a developer complaining about not getting any attention through his efforts on social media, and from what he said he did, it was easy to tell he did not know what he was doing and severely lacked the sophistication needed to succeed. Instead of paying for marketing, he decided to do it himself and was about to give up without even thinking about paying someone else to do it. This is hubris that is commonly seen in developers.
    - DrewADesign 4y ago
      Solid example, thanks. Worth specifically noting that we shouldn't be quick to judge, though. Every one of us has succumbed to novice cockiness at some point in our lives. People who build things, like developers, gain novice-level knowledge of everything from interface creation to domain-specific knowledge to copy writing to photo editing by osmosis. I'd be lying if I said I was any different.
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    > It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute. My hours of dev contributions to FOSS projects over the decades are somewhere in the low 5 figure range. Despite having a formal art school design education, I never contribute as a designer because FOSS projects are usually openly hostile to design input, even by someone like me who can implement it themselves. > Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being pigeonholed, you know? Pigeonholing by not expecting specialists to be competent outside of their specialty? I have considerable professional experience as both a designer and a developer in the past decade-and-a-half, and a couple of other completely unrelated careers in the decade before prior. You're fishing for things to be offended by, and probably misjudging the amount of design understanding required for actual competence.

DrewADesign 4y ago

I'm admittedly a hammer seeing everything as a nail, but as a designer, I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic, unnecessary branding and usability oversights. Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work any more than designers should expect themselves to be able to make scalable, reliable, maintainable, production-ready code. It's a specialty for a reason! Incorporating designers into FOSS projects from the beginning seems like a no-brainer, but design is nearly universally considered a superficial matter to be considered once the real work of back-end development is done (which is generally never.) It's one of the reason that open source alternatives will remain the alternatives rather than the standards. Good design takes a lot of up-front work, and once you get ignored or bikeshedded into oblivion with one design proposal, the liklihood of doing it again is pretty much zero. Definitely my white whale, but it kills me to see so many great projects that could have so much more impact if they enfranchised specialists to design the look and feel.

waboremo 4y ago
One of the great difficulty of tackling that problem is often FOSS projects are averse to design decisions like that made by someone relatively fresh to the project - even if the problem is incredibly obvious to the designers and not the core development team. You would have to spend a lot of time gaining trust to then be able to present an idea like switching domains. The duality of putting off design decisions until later, and also feeling like your current design is extremely personal (I've seen some projects where the maintainer immediately disregards a lot of proposals design wise because it's "good enough", as if that person just called their baby ugly), can make trying to make any progress on FOSS project feel horrible. It's a very interesting problem space I feel. There's so much room for improvement.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  As a professional designer who's spent more time in my life developing FOSS than designing, I generally see FOSS projects refusing to accept design input, period. I've thought a lot about why and I see two broad problems: First, developers have a different fundamental perspective on interfaces than most people. They view interfaces as a wrapper that you use to interact with the important part: the application. To regular users, the interface is the application. I can't tell you how many times I've seen things like customizable color themes or ill-conceived typeface changes be the primary product of a developer-initiated "UX review," largely because they didn't know how to identify actual usability problems and wouldn't know how to craft solutions even if they did. If it persists long enough, maintainers don't just see their interfaces and user paths as flawed but good enough: they assume the mitigation techniques they've developed to work around a bad interface are best practices. Second, art school freshmen subconsciously trying to prove their competence to themselves give the harshest and least useful critique and often take constructive critique as a personal affront. That phenomenon seems generalizable: critique about things we're less confident in makes us feel more insecure than critique of things we're more confident in. If someone proposed replacing a core piece of the architecture with something different, they'd be confident enough to look at it and rationally decide if it's beneficial. Conversely, when developers see redesign proposals about interfaces they were never confident in to begin with, they get defensive, and design proposals get dismissed or bikeshedded to complete buggery. I think these two things imbue the FOSS development world with indifference to, or even distrust of designers. You only need to briefly look at threads on HN focused on design or interface to see the open disdain many developers have for designers. "Ruined by designers" is a pretty common refrain. Despite our unicorn reputations, I know lots of designers/developers, and every one that I can recall at the moment contribute to FOSS... just never as designers because the process is so irritating. Myself included. It's just not worth the amount of work that goes into a competent design proposal, noting that I would implement it personally, only to have it summarily dismissed by people with false confidence in their analysis.
  - hyperman1 4y ago
    Let me respond as a developer with admittedly no taste at all, who both committed and fixed plenty of atrocities: Just like security, design is one of these things where snake oil salesmen are everywhere, to the point that finding a good one without becoming a designer yourself is hard. I also notice you identify as an artist, not a psychologist, which seems the wrong approach to me. So what will happen if I let designers loose on my program? They might have real insight and improve things a lot. Or maybe they'll go all artsy and put lipstick on the pig, leaving me with an even worse program in lovely pastels? Or maybe they'll dumb down an interface in an attempt to create a granny-safe rocket launch pad, leaving the actual rocket engineers frustrated? Or they'll just move stuff around for the sake of moving stuff around, creating a lot of busywork and forcing user retraining without any upside. I've seen all these things happen. So what is your advise to this dev? How do I get designers that actually improve the design?
counttheforks 4y ago
> Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being pigeonholed, you know? > I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic, unnecessary branding and usability oversights. It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute.
- codexon 4y ago
  Speaking as someone who was mainly a "developer" for a while, one frequent problem I see from developers is that they assume they can excel at everything because they are good at coding. Since coding is a hard task that not everyone can do well, they think this talent applies to everything else. Just a few weeks ago on here, there was a developer complaining about not getting any attention through his efforts on social media, and from what he said he did, it was easy to tell he did not know what he was doing and severely lacked the sophistication needed to succeed. Instead of paying for marketing, he decided to do it himself and was about to give up without even thinking about paying someone else to do it. This is hubris that is commonly seen in developers.
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    Solid example, thanks. Worth specifically noting that we shouldn't be quick to judge, though. Every one of us has succumbed to novice cockiness at some point in our lives. People who build things, like developers, gain novice-level knowledge of everything from interface creation to domain-specific knowledge to copy writing to photo editing by osmosis. I'd be lying if I said I was any different.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  > It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute. My hours of dev contributions to FOSS projects over the decades are somewhere in the low 5 figure range. Despite having a formal art school design education, I never contribute as a designer because FOSS projects are usually openly hostile to design input, even by someone like me who can implement it themselves. > Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being pigeonholed, you know? Pigeonholing by not expecting specialists to be competent outside of their specialty? I have considerable professional experience as both a designer and a developer in the past decade-and-a-half, and a couple of other completely unrelated careers in the decade before prior. You're fishing for things to be offended by, and probably misjudging the amount of design understanding required for actual competence.