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Comment by ohlookabird | Hacker News Reader

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".

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>> 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

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.

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

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?

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