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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

I love Blender, coming from other "industry" tools like 3ds max, Blender has all the features I want for amature 3d work.

I think my favorite thing about Blender (I still love it) is the objectively god awful user interface. It's a good learning opportunity to show what happens when a community designs a GUI (hint: never ever let it happen). Almost every single possible GUI design decision is wrong or backwards. I'm excited to try this new interface to see what terrible UI gems lie in wait for discovery. It's weird and exciting that Blender is so useful and feature filled and yet so poorly visually designed.

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It is not "objectively god awful". I for one really like Blender's user interface and I have used both 3ds max and Maya before. Blender makes it so easy to switch views and only show things that are important to you. Granted, I also use Vim heavily. For both I head to read parts of the manual though. In my eyes, Blender is a production grade tool that can do really complex workflows. For tools like this I believe it is completely reasonable to ask users to read about the tool and its design decisions rather than making everything "intuitive".

I love the 2.7* UI. The Vim comparison is extremely apt.

Vim is a perfect example of an insanely terrible user interface. That we all use it because it is powerful and also a shibboleth into devops/sysops/developers minds doesn't make it a good idea. It's just very convenient and powerful while also being the height of nerd cred.

Also the OP is right from an objective POV, the Blender UI is absolutely brutal. I use a lot of tools in this industry for my job but my job is not specifically 3d work, so I am not expected to have deep mastery of any of the tools nor does it even help me, really. This is where a decent UI that is intuitive and helpful is important, and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box.

It is, however, a great piece of software, as you all say. I totally agree there. But good lord the UI is horrific.

Even with this new update?

You've just described a subjective POV.

> and Blender for my colleagues and myself is practically unusable out of the box.

You are confusing beginner friendly with user friendly.

User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve.

That said, I can not name a single application that has a better user interface than Blender. It is a masterpiece and I am in complete awe of whatever process and the people that created it.

Could you please identify the difference between beginner friendly and user friendly for me?

I’m not convinced that there is one.

As in, you've never heard of it and suspect they've just made it up, or you're aware of the concept but have an unorthodox opinion about it? It's a very pervasive concept among UX people. If the former, try googling "learnability vs usability" or somesuch?

"User Friendly" depends on the type of tasks that the user intends to accomplish, and the frequency of those tasks. The things that expert users intend to do are not necessarily the same things that beginner users intend to do.

Essentially it is about the path-of-resistance between you and your goal. A beginner friendly UI might do X, Y, and Z. But complex tasks like scheduling X, Y, and Z, automating them based on other events, or even performing them rapidly in sequence, are likely to be given a higher path of resistance.

The key term to search for is "discoverabilty" although there are other important factors at play

I think vim is user friendly but beginner unfriendly. For whatever task I want to do with text, vim will provide the easiest way to achieve it. However, to anyone that is not experienced with it, it will be the hardest way to achieve it.

To put another way, it probably takes a couple minutes to learn and be proficient in windows notepad, and a couple months to learn and be proficient in vim. However, for a task that may take a couple months in notepad, it might take a couple of minutes in vim.

I take beginner-friendly to be a more specific form of user-friendlyness. The usefulness of the concept is that it's common to see a UX and say it's not user-friendly, because it's not beginner-friendly. However, not all users are beginners. To someone that is proficient in both vim and notepad, vim is more user-friendly than notepad, because it is more friendly to him, the user, since it allows the completion of any task far easier.

> User friendly UIs are most often terrible for experts and expert UIs often have some learning curve.

You don't have to choose one or the other, it just takes time to make it right for both.

Word is a good example example. You want to type some text? It's easy. You want to format it? Click the icons that look relevant. You do it often? Keyboard shortcuts are available for everything. You want to do typesetting? Styles are available, but not enforced. You want to automate things? Integrated programming environment is waiting for you. And almost every action has its own page in the manual.

Simple things are simple, tooltips and icons provide discoverability, and you can head to the manual for expert content.

This is totally not how blender pre-2.8 works where the discoverability almost doesn't exist.

Most of what you just said about Word (tooltips, keyboard shortcuts, icons, programming environment) is also true of Blender.

But I don't really know what the equivalent of "just type some text" would be in Blender.

Blender has the shortcuts and programming environment, but lacked the icons/tooltips in many cases. Many existing tooltips listed only what the button mapped to in the python environment.

Looking at Blender 2.79 right now, a comfortable 90% of icons, buttons etc have tooltips with useful (if terse) text. Some buttons are text instead of icons, but that's also true of Word.

I don't doubt Word is more discoverable, partly because of Microsoft's resources and partly because word processing is fundamentally more accessible than 3D modelling. But by the metrics you're talking about, Blender is maybe 75-90% as good. Which I don't think is the same as "discoverability almost doesn't exist".

> word processing is fundamentally more accessible than 3D modelling.

I'd strongly dispute the "fundamentally" part, though this may only be obvious when using a VR-native 3D modelling program rather than a desktop one.

a text processor's complexity can't even begin to be compared to a modern 3d package's, I've used a lot of them and they always suffer from discoverability issues. I often wish there was a wider range of 3d programs that did only one thing and did it well, instead of these monolithic beasts doing poly modeling, nurbs, sculpting, texturing, animation, lighting, rigging, physics simulations, rendering etc etc etc etc etc etc all in one, but for the most part the whole process is too tightly coupled, and it seems when you manage to extract one piece out you (eg sculpting with z brush) you end up adding extra complexity on top. you can fill the screen with tool tips as much as you want, it's still going to be hard to navigate.

I often find that people conflate ease of use with ease of learning. Both Vim and Blender are very easy to use. Blender is astonishingly easy to use, in fact. I've been using it for video editing and it's ridiculously more efficient than anything else I've ever used.

Both Vim and Blender are very hard to learn and discovery is extremely poor. There is just no way to figure it out without reading the manual. Even after you read the manual, you have to practice it frequently to get good at it. After that it's a dream.

I don't really like characterising a UI as "good" or "bad" in a one dimensional perspective, because whether I will choose an easy to use or an easy to learn application depends entirely on what I'm going to be doing. For example, with video editing (and also code editing), I'm doing the same actions over and over and over and over again. I'm also combining actions in different ways and I want a kind of "UI grammar" that lets me efficiently express myself without searching around for some drop down or macro. I use these tools for hours on end, day after day. I don't really care about ease of learning -- I only care about easy of use and efficiency.

For other things, I really care about ease of use. For example, I make New Years cards once a year. I want some software that helps me make a mailing list, print an image without screwing about, etc, etc. I don't want to spend more than about 30 seconds setting it. It needs to be intuitive. If anyone knows of such a thing for Gnu/Linux, I'd be very happy ;-).

Frequently ease of use and efficiency are at odds with ease of learning. Best if you can do both, but often you have to compromise. Both Vim and Blender compromise a lot, but they are aiming at a particular niche. Not everybody likes them, but those that do love them. Some other applications compromise in other ways, and at least for my applications I don't find them appropriate. YMMV.

I really like the contrast of ease of use vs ease of learning.

However, I don't think designing an interface that is good for both is fundamentally difficult. The problem comes from evolution. In early versions, with only a few features, none of this requires a ton of thought. As features are added, it's rare that an overall UX re-design is undertaken, for a few reasons.

For one, the people working on it and using it day to day are incrementally learning changes, and have time to adjust. In some cases they probably don't even notice the UX learning curve problem as it takes time to become apparent.

For two, existing and power users will freak out if a new release changes shortcut keys or otherwise "moves the cheese". Think of the outrage if vim were to announce "we're changing all the commands to be fully consistent with each other, but it means every command you've spent years memorizing is now incorrect.

Even for the most UX-focused team it's impossible to predict the feature set a product will have in 1, 2, or 5 years, so of course by the time you get there, the UX has issues.

Learnable, intuitive UI’s are not inherently polar opposite to fast interfaces. It’s not an either or. If you are thoughtful and careful, it’s possible to make something intuitive and speedy.

This was the design goal for Blender 2.8. Both of your comments seem to be based on using earlier versions of Blender.

I'll give worst user interface to git.

And I'll raise you CVS.

RCS.

Vim has modes because key combinations didn't exist on that computer it was invented on and neither did cursor keys.

It was a decent design for the original context.

Normally the fact that you had to read the manual is a sign that the UI is badly designed. Or at least that no effort has been made into making it discoverable.

There is no conflict between usability and power. You can have very powerful interfaces that don't require a manual to use.

No, for nontrivial software you can't, not without putting a manual in the UI, which is infeasible for advanced software and complex UI.

You can max out on discoverability and consistently, but the user ultimately will have to learn, through reading or experimentation, how to use the program.

Yes that's exactly what you do. You effectively put the manual in the UI in the form of tooltips, "WhatsThis", first-use popups etc.

Why would you think that is infeasible? Blender has even started improving on that front - after like 10 years of waiting it finally has tooltips!

In what way are tooltips "infeasible for advanced software"?

> In what way are tooltips "infeasible for advanced software"?

They aren't, and Blender has them. I think it's had them since I started using it, about three years ago I guess. Although they've definitely improved in that time.

Yes I mentioned they have finally added them. I've been using Blender a lot longer than 3 years and it is quite an embarrassment that it took them so long to add them.

Looks like proper tooltips were added in 2014. Blender was first released in 1998! 1998! 16 years to add tooltips!

A manual can be part of the UI. If the manual is well-written, why fault a program for using it?

This is an extraordinary claim, and is contrary to much of the UI theory I have read. Can you provide an example of a UI for a tool with the complexity of Blender which doesn't require a manual?

Solidworks is very easy to use and that is a professional CAD program.

I find it hard to believe that any UI theory says you can't have complex software that is intuitive, usable and discoverable without a manual. Link?

>> It is not "objectively god awful".

That is, like, your, very rare, by my objective consensus, opinion, man.

Honestly. Blender’s existence is a miracle. That it can exist at all, or has a serious user base compared to its commercial alternatives is baffling at best. I praise each and every one of the clearly dedicated developers who make it happen, and just because the following is true does certainly not mean I do not fully respect every ounce of effort that goes into it.

Prior to this one, minor change, the UI/UX is actually one I display to my students (I teach UI/UX design on the side) as the single worst design in software history. The mouse click being one of the first of literally dozens of examples of undoing basic behaviour I’ve seen, practically ever.

Case in point: I have seen at least a dozen of my students visibly cringe when they see the default UI/UX operations.

Blender’s back-end is incredible. To call it’s front end a disaster would be far too high praise for it. It’s not awful, you’re right. It’s arguably the worst design in recent software history.

In fact, I’d urge you to show me a worse-laid-out piece of widely-used software, so I may use it as the example instead.

I couldn't help but shake my head as I read your comment.

Almost every single paragraph you wrote stems from your personal opinion. Not a single claim you made was substantiated by any sort of supporting data. Have you even preformed studies beyond "I don't like it and saw some students dislike it"? Have you studied how proficient users use it? As it stands, your comment is a long winded complaint that blender's interface design doesn't conform to your personal tastes.

I, like GP, think Blender's interface is excellent given what it enables. The interface is consistently designed and well thought-out (mostly). The vast functionality of what blender can do is never one or two keystrokes away thanks to pan focus. Information is also grouped consistently and laid out clearly and logically. Pans allow you to easily arrange and rearrange your workspace according to the task at hand. Even menus and controls are (or can be) laid out clearly instead of being hidden deep somewhere because authors thought they wouldn't be used frequently. The interface was designed for serious long term users. It was not designed for casual or one-off users.

I just hope you are also as eager to teach your students about interface design requirements inherent to heavily-used complex software as you are to share your objective opinions.

I couldn't help but shake my head as I read yours. I've objectively said that this doesn't stem from my personal opinion, but that of my students, as well. Which immediately invalidates your first point. I've explicitly expressed, this is not my opinion. It's that of many, many others. I certainly don't just show my students all the things to do wrong, as is the case with Blender's UI/UX.

While it may have it's own merits, none of which I've personally had the benefit of experience, I'd argue encouraging certainly some of the most counter-intuitive UI/UX behaviour from the outset is certainly a great way to isolate any initial potential users.

That's not my opinion. It's a whole ton of folks opinion who happen to disagree with you.

And yes, I love to show my students complex, yet well-laid-out software like Logic Pro X or Final Cut X, which are usable to the casual user, yet offer a profound amount of control over highly technical aspects, while retaining a simplicity, expectability, and reasonable nature of a user experience. Logic and Final Cut are what I would call 'extremely well-designed yet highly technical' pieces of software.

Blender's UI/UX is absolutely, almost inarguably from a fundamental design perspective, compared every other piece of software I use in my work flow, that is inexcusable. There's no other word for it. Any amount of forethought into it's basic UI/UX operations would result in a better piece of software.

As much as I support FOSS, I'd pay for 3DS Max or Maya in half a second, because even as convoluted as their UI/UX is - at least they actually seem to understand there's a human being who is using it at the end of the day.

> That's not my opinion. It's a whole ton of folks opinion who happen to disagree with you.

And a whole ton of folks do (see blender's userbase growth). Anecdotal evidence is just that, anecdotal.

Unless you support your assertions with some sort of objective measure, your assertions are subjective by definition, and will remain so regardless of how many time you insist on it being otherwise.

> As much as I support FOSS, I'd pay for 3DS Max or Maya in half a second, because even as convoluted as their UI/UX is - at least they actually seem to understand there's a human being who is using it at the end of the day.

Funny you say that, because Blender's user interface is also designed for humans :o)

I'm curious, what specifically about blender's interface irritates you so much? Perhaps there might be something to merit such passionate hate.

>> Blender's user interface is also designed for humans :o)

Now that, I fail to believe.

These gripes of yours seem to be based on using old versions of Blender. Did you try Blender 2.8? It has an all-new UI.

Once you get the hotkey driven workflow and the, personally amazing, non-overlapping windows it's super fast to use. I'm much faster of an artist in Blender than 3ds Max or Maya. I do admit that it took awhile to learn, but since I've been using Blender which is since before they went open-source, I became accustomed to some of it's unique features.

I will admit somethings are horrible in the UI, like a hotkey available but not a menu item. Or the Keyframe Type being in the Timeline but only viewable in the Dopesheet. (I argued with the developer to no avail.) But the idea of the interface, with non overlapping windows just works.

Think of the blender ui as an "Engelbartian" design. It requires training but should enable better results once the user is proficient.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=861

I've been using Blender for a while now, and I actually miss its UI features in other apps now. I would agree that it's very unconventional and immediately baffling to new users, but not that it's "objectively god awful".

I think the most direct analogy possible is vim. "objectively god awful" is one way to describe the learning curve, even if they're immensely useful and efficient.

Then again you could say the same of keyboards in general…

Vim is pretty easy to learn, you just have to be willing to read tutorials and guides. Most complex subjects are learned that way, after all.

Vim isn't as obtuse as it's made out to be. You can learn Vim pretty easily, enough to match the usability of other editors, pretty quickly. Past that, you can learn the actual powerful commands, where it actually shines.

While it has a learning curve I think the UI is one of the best I ever used.

And I am not sure about your statement that everything is wrong and backwards. I think it's the result of thinking how to do things right so the user can be productive.

Also: Ton has a very strong voice in the project. I don't think it's all undirected community work.

Blender is really click-heavy compared with Maya, where a lot of the functionality is divided between mouse & keyboard shortcuts. Blender is not my first choice for modeling for just that reason, I feel infinitely faster in Maya no matter how long I’ve used Blender.

That’s not to say that there aren’t great features in Blender’s UI, but I think it’s a good example of how not to design a user interface.

I'm sorry, but Blender is not click heavy. Keyboard shortcuts are how you use Blender. If you are clicking around in the UI you are not using it to its full potential. For me, to model quickly in Maya, I have to setup a custom marking menu. Maybe you could speak your specific issues and I can point you in the correct direction. You are always welcome in one of the Blender Discord servers if you need some instant help.

I never used Blender, but I always thought that its interface was the "vi" of 3d design tools: not easy to learn yet very powerful. But perhaps I was wrong about that.

IMO that description is absolutely perfect, and that's not a knock on blender, if anything I think that's probably a superlative of the application.

When blender was in it's earliest forms, I was into 3D modeling as a hobby (a tv show called Eye Drops had me hooked) and recall quite well people who used blender and used it well being looked up with awe as if they were Moses coming down from the mountain, lol.

I stuck around with it long enough and now I make fun little gifs https://66.media.tumblr.com/6257d4052e4212e770fd5eb819c7688c...

> and recall quite well people who used blender and used it well being looked up with awe as if they were Moses coming down from the mountain, lol.

It is a very powerful tool to be able to create anything you can imagine, visually with 3d. Especially back in the day it seemed like magic. And those 3d tools have quite a steep learning curve so it wasn't for nothing.

Software is our modern day alchemy. You can conjure up anything you imagine with it. It should be revered!

Software is our modern day alchemy.

Are you my systems design instructor? My systems design instructor said the exact same thing in college

Nope I thought myself. It's more persuasive revelation when you discovered the power of it by yourself than having someone teach it to you. I remember the moment it all started "clicking" and you feel like any software problem is now within your reach (which I give a ton of credit to SICP for teaching me the power of abstraction).

Very true. The "aha!" moment is quite the powerful motivator, had one at work last week on a project that I was stuck on and it resulted in me staying after work for 2 extra hours once I figured out what everything was doing (inherited some very old code to troubleshoot).

Happy holidays, friend!

> Software is our modern day alchemy.

I rather think it is software combined with material science ... and 3D printer etc.

That seems like wrong revisionist history.

Blender spent the first 7 years of it's life as closed-source commercial software.

I dunno, it's not like the 3dsmax or Maya interfaces are really paragons of user interface design. If anything I think Maya is (was? haven't used in a long time) at least as weird and idiosyncratic as Blender. Meanwhile, even though Blender's UI design is weird, it does have some charm in how consistently weird it is.

How did you get to this? After using 3ds max I can't believe that they actually charge money for it, it's amazing. And the worst part is the interface.

I'm reading what you say again, like maybe I misread, but are you being serious?

This is typical, but especially in 3D. The interface you know is amazing. All others are "objectively terrible".

They did a lot of UI work on 2.80: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/U... Is your criticism aimed to these new changes?

His point is that he expects it to be worse or as bad because the same process that built Blender is the same process that upgraded the UI.

The problem with that reasoning is that most of the UI aspects that people like to complain about (including right-click-select) were part of the original closed-source application, and thus not a product of the current community-oriented process.

Also please note that on HN it's unfortunately popular to crap all over something.

And to add to that remember a large part of your user base may not be hners and have completely different tastes and challenges and delights with the UI

I agree, and I wonder if a lack of hierarchy plays a part - the programmers may not be great at design, but designers would have to tell the programmers what to do. I don't know about others, but I prefer not to be told what to do!

totally disagree. Blender's UI is great

You could say the same of Gimp, to a lesser degree.

It’s interesting that features can probably be coded by committee and volunteers (as both programs are featured packed) but UI seems to require a unified vision.

To code features, you only need to understand technology. To create UIs, you need to understand people, which is much harder. To make matters worse, I suspect many Gimp or Blender devs don't eat their own dogfood, and insofar as they do, they're accustomed to the weird taste of said dogfood.

I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point. Historically though, I think they've had opposite problems. Gimp has tended to just do the minimum to make the UI just about work with no regard for efficient/pleasant workflow, whereas Blender has abandoned convention in pursuit of an efficient workflow for experienced users.

> I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point.

I'm reasonably fluent with modern tools (Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, etc.) and consider GIMP to be an incredible accomplishment. But as much as I'd like to use GIMP, I find it too painful to use even for simple tasks.

I wish someone would start a "sister" app leveraging the GIMP codebase as much as possible, but with an entirely different user experience and name, starting with Apple Preview-level MVP functionality and building from there.

This is an understandable and common point of view -- mainly because most people come from the perspective that you do. However, I've gone the other way around. I used the GIMP for years and one time I tried to give a hand to the designers on our team that were using Photoshop. I couldn't figure it out. Eventually I had to move back to the GIMP (and I even finished the task faster than they did ;-) ).

Granted, I'm not a professional designer and the things I do are well suited for the GIMP. I usually manipulate bitmaps that will ultimately be displayed on a computer screen. This is not to say that all of the tools and workflow in the GIMP is good (the text tool, for instance, is horrible as far as I can tell). I'm just saying that there is a considerable bias when you start with one complex tool and evaluate another similarly complex tool that has a different UX.

Text, and shape drawing in The GIMP (why not call it Gnome "Imp") are particularly painful (I use Inkscape for those things).

The GIMP sucks for discoverability IMO, but I too find it comfortable because I'm familiar with it; and have found other apps crazy hard to pick up (Photoshop some years ago; Corel Draw clicked fine for me though).

I think graphics can be a bit of a grab-bag to some extent so logically connecting methods to put then in a menu hierarchy can be tricky.

>why not call it Gnome "Imp"

Because it's not an imp.

Because it's wholly unrelated to the Gnome project.

In fact it predates GNOME by three or four years.

It's the GNU Image Manipulation Program, though most people find that to be too much of a mouthful; hence "GIMP".

Yes, sorry GNU, brain-fart.

How is Gimp less of a mouthful than Imp; would it not be worth the change.

I've used it for about 20 years, have tried to recommend it to people and always feel embarrassed to do so: similar to if they called it "shit-head". Not so bad as if you were recommending someone try Brainfuck.

RIP GIMPshop

> Blender has all the features I want for amature 3d work.

What about non amateur work - what's missing? Asking as a curious amateur.

It's not just for amateurs.

Much of the 3D work for Man in the High Castle is done in Blender, as Barnstorm VFX is a Blender shop. While not used widely, there are pros using it in big productions.

The recent Netflix animated movie 'Next Gen' was made in Blender. The production company is also contributing enhancements they made to Blender back to the main project.

Crane Currency uses Blender in the design of the micro-optical animations of their Motion and Surface security threads that are integrated into banknotes around the world. Check out a US $100 bill for an example of the results. In my previous role there, leveraging Blender's flexibility for integrating functionality via the Python API into various parts of the UI was great.

I wish there was an open source CAD/CAE application that would copy a few of Blender's workflow ideas (integrated REPL, 3d view, node editor, text editor, high level language API).

All Blender is missing is 64-bit vertex storage and 2D data plotting and it would also be the perfect dashboard bridge between the physical engineering/design and data science worlds in addition to its primary audience of 3D content creation, but it's hackable enough to work around those few limitations.

You should try gimp. Same story.

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