or, simply put, nerds
it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface
if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.
It's difficult to get those kinds of creatives to donate their time (trust me on this, I'm always trying).
I'm an ex-artist, and I'm a nerd. I can definitively say that creating good designs, is at least as difficult as creating good software, but seldom makes the kind of margin that you can, from software, so misappropriation hurts artists a lot more than programmers.
I don't, as a rule, ever ask artists to contribute for free, but I still occasionally get gifted art from kind folks. (I'm more than happy to commission them for one-off work.)
Artists tragically undercharge for their labor, so I don't think the goal should be "coax them into contributing for $0" so much as "coax them into becoming an available and reliable talent pool for your community at an agreeable rate". If they're enthusiastic enough, some might do free work from time to time, but that shouldn't be the expectation.
Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists doing the same at the same scale. Or architects, or structural engineers. Maybe the closest are some boat designs but even those are accidental.
It might just be that we were lucky to have some Stallmans in this field early.
I don't know if that qualifies as "getting ripped off", but it's not exactly paying me either.
UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...
This is how we get UI's that work but suck to use. This is how we allow dark patterns to flourish. You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if it makes a dent in the bottom of the eye and you dont have to face their criticisms directly.
Which is also why UI/UX on open source projects are generally going to suck.
There's certainly no money to pay for that kind of experiment.
And if you include telemetry, people lose their goddamn minds, assuming the open source author isn't morally against it to begin with.
The result is you're just getting the author's intuitive guesswork about UI/UX design, by someone who is likely more of a coder than a design person.
Pretty much everyone is a power user of SOME software. That might be Excel, that might be their payroll processor, that might be their employee data platform. Because you have to be if you work a normal desk job.
If Excel was simpler and had an intuitive UI, it would be worthless. Because simple UI works for the first 100 hours, maybe. Then it's actively an obstacle because you need to do eccentric shit as fast as possible and you can't.
Then, that's where the keyboard shortcuts and 100 buttons shoved on a page somewhere come in. That's where the lack of whitespace comes in. Those aren't downsides anymore.
Excel is a simple intuitive UI.
I use 10% of Excel. I don't even know the 90% of what it's capable of.
It hides away it's complexity.
For people that need the complex stuff, they can access it via menus/formulas.
For the rest of us, we don't even know it's there.
Whereas, Handbrake shoves all the complexity in your face. It's overwhelming for first time users.
Yes, this is an obstacle. This makes your software worse for power users. Because now they have to jump through hoops.
If they just took all those options and dumped them somewhere, that would be better.
Okay, another example: a datagrid or table. In naive apps targeting consumers, they're filled with whitespace and they're simple to look at. Great, right?
Oh... you need to see more information than the absolute bare bones? It's okay, you can click 'show more'. The problem is that, now, it takes too much time.
What if I want to see 50 results at the same time? Gulp. If I have to click show more 10 times to do that, I'm taking my computer and throwing it out the window. I don't give a rats ass about your whitespace or visual hierarchy. I want the software to do the thing for me so I can move on with my life.
This is why people will SWEAR by old software. There are many people who refuse to use modern versions of Excel. Because it's too annoying to use, and they use it all day long, so that's not acceptable.
This means they want to add features they couldn't get anywhere else, and already know how to use the existing UI. Onboarding new users is just not their problem or something they care about - They are interested in their own utility, because they aren't getting paid to care about someone else's.
It's not a "nerd" thing.
i think the bigger issue is that the power users usecases are different from the non-power users. not a skillset problem, but an incentive one
