Folks, let me share some random observations with you, because I can’t wrap my mind around those.
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People have Zoom, Teams, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Telegram, and Viber, all happily installed on their phones at the same time. When you then invite them to Matrix they are like “Is this necessary? Why install yet another one of those?”
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People who use Chrome by default without ad blockers, and you just hint there is a massive intelligence and surveillance operation are quick to respond that “I am getting this services for free, so it is fine to give something back” [1].
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People thinking that OSS is not secure enough for their devices. Surprise surprise, it is the exact same people who fall for obvious scams and their devices are ad-ridden, bloated horrors that have not been updated in a million years, but they think that Libre Office will break their computer and lose their emails.
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People thinking that privacy and anonymity enthusiasts are shady freaks who want to go live in the woods and possibly terrorists. There is a slightly insane take here that we are against technology because we refuse to “just” install an app to make our lives easier[2].
So they do not complain about being exploited and disrespected, while ripped off and offered crap services, as long it is a capitalist corporation shaking them down with vendor lock-in and network effects. They are grateful even. But just the idea of installing a single free/libre OSS app or extension to protect their privacy is a red flag and pushes their buttons big time, even for just suggesting it.
So, what are your own examples of anti-OSS stupidity, and how do you explain its prevalence in society?
On the flip side, open source expects users to accept bad and outdated UI. The people who need a more simplified UI aren’t the people who can make the changes.
In my experience open source has been getting really intuitive ui, at least for more basic apps like messages, that are just as good or better than proprietary equivalents. It’s not like apps like apps like matrix aren’t being used because they look bad because a lot of the clients look and feel really good.
This reminds me of an older discussion about Matrix vs. Discord. Someone said that Matrix does not even have to look like (or even have comparable features to ) Discord for it is a proprietary for-profit and they have lots of people working on streamlining things and adding features. This includes the “visual appeal” of the GUI of course. Some people might find that important. If you ask me people should learn to use the shell in elementary education, so this discussion about dumbed down users (who expect a big magic button that next to reads their minds) has other angles beyond catering to that specific type of user. Because this user has been conditioned by a huge corporate ecosystem of marketers and front end developers. Interesting point for extending this discussion nonetheless.
I don’t know if it is “conditioning” so much as laziness. The effort of having to learn open source software is a lot higher than programmers believe and a lot of money is spent by closed source companies to optimize ease of use above everything else.
Open source as an economic model doesn’t have an inherent motive to increase use of a product the way that the profit motive exists for closed source products. An open source model is better when pleasing existing users instead of going for new users, especially users that don’t have the technical skill to contribute to a project.
And your response is typical of open source software advocates; it is a skill issue for users to get over.
I can’t explore the details right now. I believe that usability should be addressed by OSS developers. I believe in educating users as I believe in better funding initiatives to achieve that, as I believe in people also paying to OSS a fraction of what they pay to closed source corpos.
5 years ago, a YouTuber, musician, and UX designer who goes by Tantacrul made a comedic but accurately scathing review of the design flaws of popular open-source music notation software MuseScore. (He had previously done similar to closed-source Sibelius, and would later address Dorico.) By the end of the year, MuseScore had hired Tantacrul to head up their design team and he eventually oversaw the design and development of a completely new major revision of MuseScore with a professional team of developers. He also had a big part in Audacity’s more recent development, since Muse Group also owns that.
That’s one open source project that clearly really highly values a good user experience. They’re lucky though. It’s relatively easy for them to fund this because the open source software is a keystone element to their paid subscription web service with a very vibrant community of contributors. Not all open source has that.
This story is inspiring and unique in its own sake.
More broadly, it is important to showcase stories like these, and change the perception of bad UI/UX in OSS.
I realize, in relation to another comment on this, there is some elitism in OSS developers.
I probably have been oblivious to it because I picked up computers post-conviction as a second-chance career, and I always approached the field as an outsider. I thought that made me immune to elitism because I picked the skills up as an adult, and always thought that if I can learn then everyone can learn, but people now treat me as one of the geeks rather than as one of the normies, and it seems I did not catch up with that.
So, yes, I concede, OSS developers should put more effort into appealing and highly usable UIs, but I still believe this would work better at the OSS-“foundation” level rather than the individual developer who first and foremost develops a solution for his own use case, and broader usability is typically an afterthought.
Yeah well said. UX just isn’t developers’ area of expertise, so they’re naturally not going to develop with it at the forefront of their minds. It needs to come down from the organisation caring about and hiring (or engaging on a voluntary basis) people who are actual UX experts that can work with developers to deliver an excellent user experience.
I want to second your choice of Tantacrul’s video on MuseScore’s UI/UX, it is really a great resource. And more relevant to this discussion, at some point he says about the logo “Job Done. It is Open Source anyway, nobody is expecting too much.” How hilarious and true!
To be fair there are some aspects to it that are impossible to get right without targeted user research, so yes, this is a whole cost structure on its own, and should come down from the organization.