Yes, that is logical and predictable. But it’s not what I was referring to.
I’m sorry for my english - I couldn’t describe it any better. Now, I recorded a GIF of a basic scale command, I hope that’s easier to understand.
When the mouse is very close to the pivot point, things get weird…
That’s one of the moments when you can see the fear and dread in the faces of young students
I will have a look into the App Templates you mentioned and see if I can build a custom “noob mode” for the first hours of our workshop.
Besides all the discussion, I’d like to honestly say:
A huge THANK YOU, @RonanDucluzeau, for sharing your experience and all the insights on the Blender development and history, about why things are the way they are (and what might change in the future). This information (and context) is extremely valuable.
Are there any benefits to being able to scale object by factor of 10 because of 1 pixel or rotate it by more than 360 degrees? Some kind of sensitivity limit would be a good thing.
After all move tool doesn’t go crazy if cursor is near origin and nobody complains about it.
I also think at this point it should be restated that probably most of us, at least I am, thinking that the Blender Team is already doing a fantastic job on each new version. With every new release you can feel the improvements made very clearly.
The way I understand it we are having this UI / UX discussion now in the hopes of being on time to focus development more and to make volunteers help better, themselves, in return.
I mean … I’ve been reading all these blogposts over the last months of development and where the development is heading. Mostly we want to make heared how much we care about UX in Blender’s future. Right?
Just want to make sure (since these discussions can come across a little heated at times).
Of course.
But what makes the problem complicated is that User Experience is not a unique, standardized, bounded thing.
There are as many user experiences as users. Or I should say as many experiences as users projects.
I think that points where user experiences are converging are simplest tasks, they can do.
But at the moment, they are starting to combine these tasks to make their own project, their user experience becomes their own experience.
So, I believe that developers can handle basic bricks of a tool. How many options they want to provide for a tool ? How to expose those options ?
They can handle how to group those tools in modes.
They can listen to users to have an idea of what customer journey is the more common.
And they can provide default workspaces for most common uses.
But they can’t provide every possible workspaces as a perfect solution for everybody.
There is a point where user has to customize the software.
And at that moment, mission of developer is to allow him to customize what he wants to customize.
Grease Pencil team effort was not just sprint exercise during their Open Movie.
Some of people involved followed Grease Pencil evolution during whole 2.7x series.
But I choose this example, because at the end, they ended-up providing a custom Workspace for 2D animation that is a lot different than others.
For example, layers list is an order that is inverted compared to all the others lists used for 3D animation.
You need experienced Blender users to oppose to new users that what they are asking to remove or to change may impact other people experiences of the software.
So, that is where brainstorming from community is needed.
But the community being so big, now, I don’t see more pertinent way to achieve such result than through open projects, involving a limited amount of people on a daily basis, but with a work open to community critics and contributions on a weekly or monthly basis.
Online Manual F1 is the last line of right context click menu.
And existence of this context menu is indicated in status bar.
Maybe it should be called Context/help menu.
Or F1 should be mentioned in Status bar. But that would require an icon able to express mouse hovering.
Yes, tooltip is probably the best place for that.
Well. I think that Forester64 find the solution.
Except, randomize, all transform tools in edit mode are also requesting mouse movement.
Maybe some of them could benefit of that, too.
Yes. But I think that until the position of Developer Community Coordinator is not filled.
We can’t expect developers to be fully responsive to our remarks.
Honestly compared to say Maya or Houdini Blender is a breeze to learn. Still, as it provides many low level tools to get the job done, it’ll always be “rather complicated”. That’s the tradeoff for having great power.
Good teaching is where it’s at, imho.
Perhaps you have no idea how user experience design works?
And a perfect example why you don’t typically invite SME’s with legacy experience to try and understand new user issues.
I would start by testing the difference between the current paradigm for “scale dragging” (which seems inconsistent based on how G works) vs just “scale dragging” from the current mouse position immediately after the S key is pressed.
Then test it and see which performs better for all users. Evaluate, iterate and retest.
Ok, then we are agreed, Blender should establish User Experience as a core value.
The next step is to create a plan and involve user experience professionals and allocate resources for data gathering.
You wouldn’t put Blender’s code base in the hands of script kiddies, and you shouldn’t leave user experience design to developers (or in that fact to user interface designers). That’s why you hire professional UX designers.
That is all part of the user experience design equation. No one said UX was only about new users, so you needn’t fear.
Yes, but we’re not asking the whole community to design the UX anymore than we’re asking them to do the foundation programming of Blender.
That’s a very narrow point of view. We are talking about people’s first experiences here. they wouldn’t know why it happened what just happened because it was an unexpected behaviour. And it’s not that easily discoverable that you need to get your cursor/mouse/pointer far away from the object in order to diminish the incremements. No one is saying the function should be removed, rather that at no point it should there be a chaotic action. Specially for first time users.
We’re referring to mouse hover activation of the help manual, not the right click menu. The link in the right click menu is discoverable and that’s good! But no other program I’ve ever heard of has a button press while hovering over a UI element to open its manual. That is the feature that is unintuitive and not discoverable because it’s not a convention used anywhere else.
But don’t fixate on this one specific action too much. It is only being used as an example of how there is a broader category of user interactions that aren’t discoverable from the UI because they only exist as a hotkey with no hint of their existence. There are many more instances than just this.
If you take the example of Pablo Dobarro, what happened is a developer who made a largely documented proposal to improve UX in sculpt mode and the whole sculpt mode module became his onus.
He inherited of a bunch of tools developed by other guys.
He has to deal with users who are used to tools he wants to change.
So, most of feedback and bugreports, he is confronted to is about UX.
I probably did not express it correctly.
But what I wanted to communicate is that there is no sharp boundary between maintenance, new features and UX.
By definition, a developer (module owner or small volunteer contributor) is involved into UX discussion. He does not stay away, sitting in his corner, waiting for an UX master to enlighten him.
And in an free open source software, you can’t expect community to stay away of discussions, too.
Of course, having people in charge to keep consistency in program is needed. But anybody can help in that direction.
But at some point, we can talk endlessly about what should be done, if there is nobody to write the code that makes things happening : they are not happening.
But are those things really bad things ?
“Uncommon interactions” does not necessarily means “unpleasant interactions”.
It is not because something is not discoverable easily, that users don’t want to use it.
Often when great feature are not easily discoverable ; it is just because people did not find a way to make them discoverable.
I repeat myself. But 2.8 UI is not old at all. Not enough to have been polished.
Just as there is no sharp boundary between a car mechanic and a heart surgeon. If you can do one, you can certainly do the other.
You trivialize and demean the profession of User Experience Design.
Obviously you don’t know what UX design is. Maybe all caps? UX IS NOT UI. Please inform yourself, then possibly you can add value to this discussion.
Can a developer tell you the % of new users have an issue with a feature? Or can they provide information on heat map and workflow analysis over a wide range of features and functions?
Or, do they just “pick a pretty color” for buttons, and call it UI? Of course non of these are true. And I wouldn’t discount developer’s contributions to a product the way you discount UX designers. I guarantee there are plenty of UX designers that affect many of the products and software apps you interact with everyday. Just because Blender doesn’t use them, does not mean they have no value or are NOT needed.
I understand perfectly what UX is, stop trying to think that you know something special about the topic… What do you think, that you are the only one that try to change something?
UX is also UI, if you don’t know that you don’t know what UX design is. Inform youself.
Interesting thread. A bit too heated and getting personal.
I don’t think anyone would question this. I guess the only trade off would be in terms of allocating resources in a constantly evolving competitive environment. But obviously UX would need to be a constant main focus. As you said though, it’s just a matter of identifying the user base and make decisions in terms of the preferred direction.
Now, this is debatable, but due to the complexity I’d say it’d be more practical to aim for professionals. I didn’t have the feeling that post 2.80 Blender was more hard to learn than any other comparable 3D package, if anything it was easier (I’m sure this varies from person to person)
It’d be interesting to see though if the cluttered UI would be lighter with more and more aspects going node based. Since that seems to be the long term goal and all. With that comes a steeper learning curve just like with Houdini, but it’s an industry requirement (for good reasons). That’s just where things are heading.
A heard Ton proposing different versions of Blender focusing on different needs. A pro version with all the bells and whistles, and separate versions for hobbyists making it easier for them to jump in and just sculpt a head for example.
Not sure if that’s still on the table, I personally feel that workspace presets are pretty friendly and a lot could be achieved in that realm. Like 2D anim, just start it up in that environment and start painting/animating. Doesn’t get more friendly than that.
To me this is a feature not a bug. Coming from maya, having to hit + - to adjust gizmo size for more or less accuracy is a pain compared to placing the cursor consciously before pressing S. Just my personal take though, if it would be optional no one would mind.
Arguably people would jump into forums more often to complain than to praise a product. If people don’t have issues they probably wouldn’t take the time to write in threads. Also true for most professionals. They try the product, if they feel it’s inadequate they just move on to other packages more suitable for their needs.
Anyway, it’s really interesting to read the thread, especially since the conversation was started by someone with immense experience in the field. Would be cool to see specific papercuts since it can read vague at the moment, probably contributing to the thread getting a bit hostile.
There is a very simple definition of the UX, UX is what you feel when you use something.
Or even you are not using it yet but you are going to do it
and you are already experiencing some feeling.
Or you have used something in the past and you have a memory, a feeling, an emotion…
For a scientific definition, you can read ISO 9241-210.
Please note that this is not about development, it is somewhere between design and branding, even closer to the brand and the overall perception of the product.
