‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by felipeerias on Friday January 16, 2015 @10:01AM (#8899251)

Creative work requires continuous experimentation and refinement. If a tool lets you do this easily and without getting in the way, your brain is free to focus on the piece that you are creating. So, while it is true that one can do the same things using another tool like Gimp, the fact that it takes significantly more time and effort means that it will be much harder to end up creating the same art.

The funny thing is, engineers actually understand this perfectly when talking about text processors, but for some reason they (we) often fail to generalise it to other fields.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by rifung on Friday January 16, 2015 @01:14PM (#8900510)

Is it common for engineers to even be able to influence the UX decisions? I thought that was generally left to designers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by paulojreis on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:38PM (#8901142)

Yes, a million times yes. Mostly in engineering-focused teams, it is very common (even when they have designers on the team).

It's a sad state of affairs, but it is pretty common for the designer to just "push pixels" on engineer command - the engineer conceives (horribly) the UI in his head, sketches, and then tells the designer to make it pretty. The designer is merely a decorator. I saw it happen a lot in a telco, but it happens almost anywhere where the engineering skills are considered the core.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by aikah on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:12PM (#8900985)

> Is it common for engineers to even be able to influence the UX decisions? I thought that was generally left to designers.

Feels to me that no designer worked on Gimp UX.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by JohnBooty on Friday January 16, 2015 @01:46PM (#8900777)

On a lot of software development projects, particularly open-source ones, the reality is that there are often only engineers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by omnimus on Friday January 16, 2015 @04:05PM (#8901693)

Well as a designer, its not realy easy to help on opensource projects. Its hard to join something like that and if you do, the projects themselves usualy need UX design not some pretty colors and some logo. But thats exactly what engeneers mostly want. I dont blame them, they spend lot of effort to make the project and they have their own ideas about how it should work (for them).

But good UX is about objectivity and about efficiency. Its also a process.

Another thing is that there is no tradition in that for designers. Opensource programming free time fun project for programmer is equivalent maybe something like making print posters for designers.

And interaction design schools are hardly helping that, they should make students to help out on opensource projects maybe as part of their assignments/diplomas.

How would i join opensource projects that need designers? I dont know.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by noir_lord on Friday January 16, 2015 @07:47PM (#8902789)

I always found this interesting, I get on with and learn more quickly interfaces built by other programmers even when such interfaces are regarded as "badly designed" by none-programmers.

I think it's because as a programmer my mental model more closely matches that of another programmer.

Which is terrifying when I do UX stuff myself because then I worry I'm building stuff for other programmers when I'm aiming at general users.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 by omnimus on Saturday January 17, 2015 @06:25AM (#8904115)

The problem is that you have much higher understanding of the inner parts of software. You might group functions together by type pf operation you do, by used algorythm... Your mind knows that these are operations that work with memory so you look there.

For example average user has mostly no understanding of things like reading data into memory and that it must be saved aferwards. For him the edit is already on the screen, like when you write on paper.

Also ux quality is imposible to measure. Lot of times its desicions between Ok bot not great vs Ok but not great.

The biggest problem on opensource projects is no consistent unifying philosophy, no aim. Users can learn anything, it just has to be consistent. Lot of times there is one developer wanting to see every posible function on the sceen, second one is making contextualy avare menus and thir one believes in text input search. Three of those together are just a mess.

[ Parent | on HN ]