Nothing made with GTK is beautiful or intuitive.
GTK choice of putting everything, including buttons, on the windows title bar kills intuitiveness and slows down the workflow. When a window/dialog/whatever opens, I look at the title, then if necessary I move it to another place by grabbing that same title bar, which is immediate because that is where I was already looking to, then start reading its contents downwards. When finished I'd expect to see choice buttons just below the contents of that frame, I'm looking just there so that it would come very easy, but no, now I have to go back upwards and find the title bar to push a choice button. To me, this is against any interface writing logic; it trades usability for a dubious more modern appearance, and I would very much welcome a patch to correct it.
There's always a hypervocal minority in any a GNOME related thread claiming that GNOME 3 was a regression, it has too much padding, it's too slow, it takes too much memory, it doesn't allow you to configure something, etc etc etc.
Meanwhile, every big distro chooses it and millions get on with it just fine.
I'm mostly not in a direct line-of-fire for user complains due to Gtk/Gnome (but actually received some, mainly around, you guessed it, file dialogs), but the impact zone is basically next door. And it's not exactly happy noises and good smells coming out that door. This is from users who couldn't care less what the thingamajing is called and don't know or care if their Linux explorer is called Dolphin or Thunar. What they do notice is that they've got an OS upgrade from IT and now they're angry because two thirds of the UI are gone and the remainder makes less sense to them.
I don't understand why everyone keeps trying to make it work. It's not what anyone wants.
I wish we could have something like it with Qt/KDE. Calligra's Karbon once was a nice promise but it is now only a shadow of what it was meant to be and even living a slow death.
But if very basic components like file choose and file save dialog are incredibly painful to be used with buttons scattered through all window corners (fitts law anyone?) then "nothing" starts resounding in your mind.
https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_imag...
You can find another control at bottom left to choose file codification or whatever.
Font select dialog:
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/fontchooser.png
Will gtk4 be any better?
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/fontchooser.png
No, there is an extra settings button before select which looks to me totally secondary not to be present by the primary button. Primary actions should be together: - Choose letter - Choose size - Click select ...In a row or L movement
We will get this extra UI darkening: now is not evident you can type font size numbers cause all controls are flat.
In gtk3 at least inputs look like inputs and buttons look like buttons.
It seems to me that designers are much less likely to give their time for free to a software project than programmers. Is that why OSS suffers from problems like this? A junior UI designer would never make these kinds of decisions.
I can understand why designers wouldn’t work for free. What I don’t understand is why an average coder couldn’t do some basic googling and learn the fundamentals. You can get a long way by imitating commercial work and following standard conventions. So is it lack of skill, or some sort of mistaken belief that the conventions established by the experts are wrong?
I’m wondering here if the idea is to imitate a forward/back step from a wizard (albeit with the buttons in the “wrong” vertical position) Not a paradigm appropriate for repeated everyday interactions, mainly because wizards are not designed for efficiency.
UI usage is mostly learned.
Just to be clear, I don't think GTK is the perfect UI system. In my opinion, there is none.
Moreover, which users who never used a PC before would be using Gnome?
But we need to be aware of those learned habits, metaphors and conventions and build those affordances into our own designs if we want people to use our software efficiently.
A convention often used in modals and other popup windows is to put the close icon in the top right. So putting the confirm button there could cause a user to click it wanting to close the window and confirm a destructive action instead.
Another convention is to put the confirm/cancel buttons at the bottom of a dialogue window. Buttons like those don't normally go in the title/toolbar, and putting them there goes against the top-down, left-to-right way we read things.
Putting things in non-conventional places is not 'wrong' per se, but adds extra friction to every interaction.
Yes, it is. There are lots of UX rules backed by research.
Fitts' Law in this case is just one reason why this is wrong.
Now, let's get rid of all visual clues for actions/controls...
Implementing a design requires discipline and a shared vision, which is often against the bazaar-like nature of open source projects. Everyone's working on their own particular piece and can't agree about anything at all – just look at the internecine battles that are still going on about which init system to use.
In my experience, any attempt at making an interface better, even if it's proven with data and testing, results in extreme pushback about dumbing down. The attitude seems to be that making software accessible is not 'real computing' and therefore should be fought tooth and nail.
Designers often don't work on open source projects not because they don't work for free, but because it's a miserable experience.
Having said that, good counter-examples to this are the recent Blender redesign, where significant effort has been put into making the software more consistent and easier to use, and the Elementary distro where one of the goals is to create a good user experience.
This did also occur to me, but I don't have any experience of it.
I do know that solo designers working in a team of commercial devs often find it a miserable experience.
I find it nice that the cancel is visually separated away, most important primary actions are prominent and in the top right.
I find gnome to be quite nice and friendly compared to five years ago when I'd always jump to a KDE desktop first thing.