[Jedd]

> but are awful at UX

This is such a weird trope.

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.

[pdpi]

"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".

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.

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)

[bzzzt]

> This is such a weird trope.

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.

[Moomoomoo309]

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...

[throw10920]

Amusingly enough, the only OSS desktop applications with good UIs got them by shamelessly stealing from commercial software that had actual paid engineers and UI/UX researchers.

OSS's UI is subsidized by commercial software.

[savolai]

Gimp may be a bitnof a bad example nowadays? Of course depends on your habits and standards.

[erikbye]

Compared to Microsoft Office suite, Libre suite is definitely not slow.

[savolai]

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.

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.

An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.

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.

Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.

[johnnyanmac]

>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.

Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.

[savolai]

Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users

https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source...

Product & framework thinkers: Case studies.

https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...

[riddlemethat]

Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.

[brailsafe]

> microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce

Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.

For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.

Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.

[bitwize]

Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user.

Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.

[johnnyanmac]

>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.

[throwa356262]

Actually, I like Microsoft Teams.

I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.

[high_na_euv]

Teams are decent, wdym?

Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.

[dfxm12]

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.

[b00ty4breakfast]

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

[giancarlostoro]

Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.

[xboxnolifes]

Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.

[cadamsdotcom]

I think you misread and assumed this was a comparison to something else. It’s not.