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Comment by gilesvangruisen | Hacker News Reader

Why does open source software tend to lack quality / usable design?

I don't work on open source but it could be:

- Good design requires user interviews, which are less common in open source - The sorts of people who are most attracted to open source work are programmers, not designers - Open source software can get popular even with bad design; closed source software with bad design fails and shuts down

Designers have it really hard in free software because good design is about understanding the big picture, knowing what to leave out, have product vision to follow. That's tough to do in environment where goal is to make everyone happy and the biggest say have programmers who are developing the thing who are usually not interested in design, inexperienced in design or have their personal very specific product vision.

I think you definitely identified the issue well. Changing the design of an existing project, especially if you're not already involved in the project is a daunting task. You have to try and convince a core group of users that the design is going to be better to entice new users. But the problem is that those core group of developers likely don't care that the UI isn't up to par, and likely don't want it to change.

I even remember having this problem personally when trying to improve designs of webpages at my workplace. We had many of our technical users still using the command line for their mail, and even for browsing some webpages. Their whole workflow was stuck in the command line and they've been doing it that way for 20+ years. Trying to change things to improve the experience for others was like pulling teeth. They would retort the classic "Why change it? It works the way it is, no need to change it". Which to a degree I can understand. Some websites out there really do change their UI's for completely silly reasons and sometimes even lose functionality because of it.

At least this is one positive thing coming from AI driven development. People can actually make some pretty decent UI's without having to know as much about good UI design. AI can try to utilize the "best practice" standards and make a UI that often looks much better than most devs could make. There are some downsides of course, such as the fact that almost every new website nowadays looks the same, since Claude seems to have one style it always goes with. But maybe that tradeoff is okay.

I don't agree about the AI at all. AI is terrible at design (compared to programming).

Having relatively nice UI skin doesn't equal good design. They are surprisingly unrelated as i am sure people know highly usable well designed software with bad UI and also know super beautiful UIs that are unusable - badly designed.

AIs are bad at design because they don't understand and can't keep context of the whole together. Just like in programming they are much better at solving single well defined problem. Design is very much opposite of that, it's always about reharmonizing in context with the whole after you make a change.

I have seen enough atrocious proprietary UOs that I am not convinced your underlying thesis is correct.

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