this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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Which is amusing, because the UX for Facebook, X and TikTok are horrendous also. So much stuff buried under layers of settings
And none of those settings will give you the experience you actually want.
There was a point in time in OG Facebook, maybe the early 2010s, when they let you have really granular control of the timeline. Like they allowed any post to be clicked and you could change the amount you saw from that person or page on a sliding scale, and it actually worked! They of course got rid of it
Well, that's intentional though. The stuff that's buried is the stuff that doesn't make them money.
Bad ux in open source is because nobody has any money.
Well, people make good code that is open source, even though it doesn't make them any money. Same with wikipedia articles.
So why are we not seeing more contributions in the form of better UX/UI it the open source world? I don't see a logical reason why that has to be the case. The question is what can we do to change it, and also get UX-designers on board?
I'm not saying it's a matter of desire. It's a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.
Further, ux design is a less "atomic" process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.
What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should contribute to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.
Thank you for expanding on this topic, and I get what you're saying about proper UX and how it requires a holistic understanding.
It least that is what is required to climb from "ok, I guess" to "good". But is there something that could get us from "terrible" to "ok, I guess"? What's your take on better, clearer design guidelines for example?
Overall, in my experience, any improvement will require the same amount of time; whether from bad to acceptable or acceptable to good.
"The UI is bad" = "It doesn't feed me new and popular content automatically"
Basically sums that up.