Andrew Price - Improving Blender's UI

"...the learning curve for modeling is so steep" I agree Blender has an intimidating UI (most 3D apps do). There's been a recent campaign to improve the Blender UI that has (not surprisingly) met with mixed views from the Blender community. In my view, Blender has the same problems with UX as many open source projects: you can't design by committee, but everyone feels they should have a say in the UX. As soon as you create a dedicated team to shape the UX, it creates so much resentment. (Ubuntu is another example of this). Here is a Youtube video of a presentation at this years Blender Conference (Oct 2013) on improving the Blender UI. The Q&A at the end of the session is a bit depressing: the audience seem resistant to change and feel that making Blender easier to use would mean "dumbing down" the app. [this video]

A good article - thanks for the link. I think user testing is an essential part of making software more usable, but it's not the only aspect of the design process. When it comes to UX, I don't believe you can design by committee, but everyone feels they should have a say in the process (and if you've contributed to the code of a project, you probably feel an even stronger sense of ownership which is perfectly natural and understandable). As soon as someone feels their UX suggestions are ignored, it causes so much resentment. The result is often a distrustful and even resentful relationship between design and development. This is such a familiar scenario in the Open Source community particularly for large Open Source projects. Here's a small example from the Blender community that illustrates the difficulty in reconciling different views about UX. It's a Youtube video of a presentation at the 2013 Blender Conference (Oct 2013) on improving the Blender UI. In the Q&A after the presentation, one audience member (rightfully) says we shouldn't treat users as idiots, but then adds that making Blender easier to use might entail "dumbing down" the app - this elicits a round of applause from the audience. Dependending on your point of view, that's a perfectly legitimate concern or a depressing misunderstanding about ease-of-use: [this video] My impression is that there's a fractious relationship between design/UX and development in the open source community that hasn't changed much over th