This is a follow-up to a comment I wrote a few months ago that caused some heated reactions and, now that I look, seems to have reduced my activity on this site. In the months since, I’ve spent some time thinking about why my comment rubbed people the wrong way, and coming up with a less threatening phrasing. I know, terrible social timing. But I think it’s an important conversation to have. So here it is, a do-over:
I’m very happy to receive the work people put in to reduce the number of seams in my experience. But if a website lays out wrong with text overlapping with text, and then fixes itself after I resize a little and rejigger the fonts, I try to put that out of my mind. I want to focus on the important stuff. Is this website or app giving me useful information, is it respectful of my attention, is it relaxed around me (not squirming, squirming to get its tentacles deeper into me). A seamless experience can’t compensate for failings in these areas, and it is all too common for seamless experiences to hide all manner of deeper malfeasance. When we push for more seamless experiences we’re also encouraging the organisms we interact with to grow more tentacles (hiring! HR!), make them more muscular (growth team!), use them more ceaselessly in search of advantage (an ad protruding slickly from the bottom of the pane! Marketing materials persuading people to not organize!)
Let’s cut the mild grasshopper some slack; hopefully then it won’t turn into a locust.
Open source should absolutely try to improve its UX. I don’t want to encourage complacency. But any comparison purporting to judge the “best” apps is useless if it’s not holistic. Accountability and trustworthiness (admittedly not perfectly correlated with open source! but correlated!) too belong on the credit column, and with far greater weight.
Hah, that reminds me of my goodware radar on the internet. If a website is really plain-looking, minimalist and rough around the edges, you know you’re downloading good software written by someone who cares. The more polish there is in the web UX, especially if there’s loads of whitespace, the more the software behaves like malware. Works pretty reliably. If you have excess budget that goes into UX, you’re almost always either neglecting core functionality or taking advantage of your users somehow. I wish it wasn’t the case, but that’s just the way it is.
Examples:
Counterpoint:
I think that your theory is really only potentially relevant to enthusiast / nerd software so I limited my examples to folks producing high quality nerdware.
It’s a shame other platforms have nothing like the Mac shareware ecosystem. Very much the last reflex of commercial software like that.
I have in the past, I don’t bother now, tried to explain to folks who rip on Macs that having fewer software options is a feature.
I think nobody quite sat me down and explained to me that there’s a stable community (neither growing[1] nor shrinking) that buys software for money.
[1] Not growing (roughly) is important to keep out investors that don’t share the subculture’s values.
I’m still skeptical this can last. It feels like mom and pop stores until they get acquired by large chains. But what do I know. I’ll cheer it on and hope it lasts.
It certainly helps that Mac users have, by buying a Mac, demonstrated that they’re happy to spend good money for a high quality product.
I’ve heard that part before, but it hasn’t been as persuasive:
Here, the key new argument I’m hearing (correct me if I’m wrong) is that people who support Mac shareware are the secret sauce, and yes the community probably got bootstrapped by Apple’s premium aura at some point in time. But it seems to have a quasi-independent (modulo App store) existence at this point.
I used Macs from 2008 to 2022 (exclusively at the start and tapering off halfway through to return to Linux), but I never quite made it into this community. I only saw scattered glimpses of it on landing pages here and there that I never integrated into a coherent view of a subculture.
I see, this might be what I’m missing.
I have to say, I am with @benjaminri here.
His list shows some website which to me say “here are some professional tools that may be of use to you if you want to do something and don’t want to mess around and waste time.”
Your list shows 2 sites with cartoonish, pretty but almost childish, ways to mess around and waste time – therefore are not really of interest to me – and a website that says “hi, we made this bloated inefficient tool in the past and here is a new tool we made and we have absolutely zero mention of it being less bloated or less inefficient” (subtext: it’s not).
It’s like GNOME vs Xfce.
I keep reading GNOME fans who says “it looks great, it’s so slick and efficient, it’s got a great keyboard UI and it gets out of my way.”
What I see:
it does look great but I don’t care about looks, I care about functionality much more.
it’s extremely wasteful of screen space and only looks efficient if you don’t know how to use space efficiently.
it has a passable keyboard UI that breaks 30Y of prior art in keyboard UIs, so it’s only good if you didn’t know how to use your older tools. Compare: ribbon-based MS Office versus previous 20Y of MS Office.
it’s not efficient: it’s written in blasted Javascript, FFS, and in its preferred Wayland implementation it’s a giant single thread and if that dies, you lose your entire desktop and all apps, whereas with X11 you could just alt-F2, xterm,
metacityor whatever and be back up and running.It looks nice but it doesn’t work very well unless you never appreciated how well the previous generation of tools work.
I use Xfce on several machines and the design of that says to me, like this basic functional websites, “we care about it working more about the cosmetics, so if you want to slap skins on it, go ahead”. So like the post you’re responding to: I value a minimal cosmetic over the bling you prefer.
I’m not saying you are wrong. You do you. But what you like says to me “values form over function”. I value function over form, and if it looks nice that’s a bonus. Your post doesn’t refute the one you’re replying to: it reinforces its message.
My comment was responding to this portion of their comment
Panic Transmit has been the Mac workhorse FTP and remote file management Swiss Army knife since 1998. The Rogue Amoeba line is highly specific, focused utilities targeting audio engineers, music producers, and content creators.
They’re all native apps, written for Macs only, no Electron. They are consistent with the OS UI and functional metaphors. They fulfill specific tasks well.
They’re not diamonds in the rough. They’re particularly good examples, but there are many small software producers making Mac specific software that is concerned with solving problems in a way thoughtful of UX, both in marketing communication and the app itself, because that’s what their customers value.
When looking for cli FOSS tools the users value other stuff. Pure black text on a pure white background. Blue links. Bulleted lists with big indents. It’s an aesthetic.
The bottom half of your comment I don’t really know what to do with.
Yeah, if you actually used any of these Mac apps, you’d realize they’re often far more intricate and featureful than they look at first glance, moreso than GUI apps on other platforms. Things like gestures and the contents of the menu bar will make this obvious when you actually use them. Good design makes them easy to get started with and progressively discloses further functionality.
Well, yes: you listed 3 examples, and I mentioned 2 of them. Rogue Amoeba was the one I wasn’t talking about, because it’s [a] not a games company [b] doesn’t do Electron apps AFAIK.
And @benjaminri’s examples weren’t CLI apps, so while you do have a point, I don’t think it applies to them very well.
As for the rest: well, OK then, never mind. I am aware I am something of an odd-one-out here but I don’t think I’m entirely alone.
I purchased a printer from a major manufacturer yesterday and had to download drivers. Let me tell you, the webpage was janky AF but I’m not sure that translates into good software…
for me, good design and UX are part of this
if a tool makes me squint or mess around with my window or zoom or fonts or styling, that’s effort spent on something besides actually using it
Absolutely agreed! But there are degrees to this. If I adjust the fonts once, that’s some cost. If the design keeps changing and moving things around in ways I don’t care about, that’s a larger cost.
Good design is a contingent thing you can gain or lose. When Gruber compares a proprietary Mastodon app with an open source one, that’s a perfect place for the caveat that, you know, this one’s great now but if it degrades because they took out some additional VC funding, you’re outta luck. With this second app they know someone else might make a fork so they’ll be more careful. They gave up some leverage early, and that deserves credit.
I think we’re talking about three different things:
I personally agree with your take on websites: if the content is useful to me, I don’t mind an imperfect UX or an austere UI, as I know how difficult web design is, and I know my browser can help me. And of course, if the content sucks, the best UX in the world and the most shiny UI in the world won’t compensate.
But the original blog post is talking about different apps for browsing the same contents, and all it’s saying is: when comparing Mastodon clients, iOS ones seem to have put more effort to UX and more attention to detail. It may be related to the very choosy Apple Store validation process, which started with the best intentions of “high-end UX for everyone” but turned out to feel like dictatorship IMHO. And it doesn’t seem to be related to the open-sourceness of some of the apps, as even closed-source Android apps don’t seem acceptable to the author.
Finally if you wanna talk about UX of open-source apps, clearly there’s a lot to say, but I believe it can be put this way: many open-source communities could be better at asking/encouraging/integrating non-code contributions (including design), and many UX designers could be better at proposing their help instead of criticizing open-source apps UX. Decent UX design is making the product easily usable ; great UX design is making the product enjoyable to use (sometimes so enjoyable that you want to use it more, which can lead to dark patterns to capture your attention), and this stuff is really hard (way more difficult than the tech stuff if you ask me). And one of the many beauties of open-source is: if you think it’s useful but could be better, your help is more than welcome!
For this conversation I don’t see a big difference between websites and apps, and I think we can think similarly about UX vs open source with either of them.
We all used to think of the web browser as an app for “browsing the same contents”, but today web browsers increasingly prioritize ads. So it’s not the same contents anymore. This is the same trajectory websites went through a few years earlier.
In the end apps and websites are both code. Those who control the code get a lot of influence over the UX.
I absolutely agree with you that open source projects could be more open to designers.