Fallacy of authority, anyone can perfectly tell hundreds of UX and UI problems from apple software.
And fallacies are for those who want to believe them, not for others.
This is just complete BS. UX is something specific and easily measurable.
You can take for example a random sample of 20 people who have never used your software before, and sit 10 of them in front of the version with A interface, and 10 of them in front of the version with B interface. Then you can have them perform a list of the tasks using the software, and measure parameters such as:
- How long did it take them to accomplish the task.
- The quality at which the task was accomplished.
- How many times did they need to seek external help (documentation or internet search).
- How many times did they encounter roadblocks they had difficulty overcoming.
- How many times did they encounter a task/procedure they’d describe as frustrating, etc…
You can then compare the result and clearly decide if either A or B has better UX in specific area. And this way it’s easily possible to arrive to a software with a good UX (Which, admittedly, Blender is not).
UX can be easily measured and quantified. It’s not a matter of feelings.
This would give a valid comparison if every software would have completely identical features which is never the case. Need to compare apples to apples for this to be a usable way of measuring and comparing. (for 3D softwares that is)
No. I try to explain that in an opensource development, each profession role involved is democratized.
Many people are just volunteers. And you don’t ask his diploma to any people who raise his voice.
The next target for current development fund is to be able to pay 20 developers.
Although you are a professional, well paid to give guidelines to how many people.
You can’t review 60 patches per day. You need some help.
And because you are part of a small team, there is a chance to be involved in things that are not directly related to your skills field.
UX is not UI. But don’t deny that UI and presence/absence of features has a huge impact on UX.
UI is what user is confronted to and it shapes his experience.
When you open blender 2.8 for the first time, you don’t open pdf document that William produced to expose guidelines for 2.8 to community or open a book about blender history of how features were created during last 20 years.
That is not what I am talking about.
But the fact that a feature is present as a button in an header or in properties editor, an item in a menu or a pie-menu : that has a real importance.
It implies that user need a workspace showing 2 editors or not, has to travel screen or not during accomplishment of his task.
And here, discussions about coloring things have always been serious.
People wanted restoration of colored icons to help readability of those unknown new icons in Properties editor, color coding of brushes icons to categorize them.
And recently, there was a long discussion about color tagging of collections in outliner to easily distinguish them in a view showing dozens of items.
I did not completed my sentence. I was implicitly meaning when “user will be aware of his existence”.
A beginner in 3D, don’t know anything about snapping. He may be familiar with snapping from 2d software. But he don’t know about all the different snap targets, he can define in 3D.
When somebody discovers that he can make a selection of multiple snap targets by pressing A key ; he is rarely angry at the point to ask for removal of feature and a more complicated process to replace it.
The principle to snap to center of all targets selected is simple, intuitive and easy to use. But it is hardly discoverable. You need to read manual, follow a tutorial or somebody has to tell you that exists.
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What? O_o
Did you read what I wrote?
It would be the same software, just with a different user interface versions. Same features, just presented in a different way and/or implemented differently from UI standpoint. Obviously I would not sit 10 people in front of Photoshop and another 10 in front of GIMP. That comparison would make no sense, of course.
What I said is just a thought experiment that disproves nonsense sentiments in a tone of “There’s no perfect user interface because everyone is different and has different feelings”.
Quality of UI is not a subjective thing. It’s always objective, and the objectivity comes from the proportion of people who find the user interface good. In other words, if you have a piece of software where 45% of the users claim they find the UI good, and another piece of software where 82% of users claim they find UI good, you can clearly, objectively say that the latter software has better UI.
I know you think you’re the only one in the world who knows about it. If you don’t know that UX depends on UI too, especially in blender, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, surely you’ve accepted some terminology somewhere that you’ve read where the UI is not part of the UX of a software that is basically what you interact with the most. And you think that because you use it, it’s already a kind of dogma on the rest of the planet.
A secret, no, it’s not. I would teach you what the abstraction of concepts is and how there is not a single vision of each concept in the world, but as you say you are an expert I’m sure you already know.
And if you really think that you’re the only one here that has ever designed any software, that has had to design something or has had to deal with the user experience and that you know something special about human psychology that the rest of the world doesn’t… but you’re wrong. The rest of us have also had a professional life designing UX of all kinds, products, interfaces, virtual reality programs, creating concepts,… And no, we are not trying to use as an authority argument that we worked a year in a site half a decade ago. Which I find ridiculous, by the way.
Sorry, but this could not be further from the thruth.
UX means User eXperience and UI means User Interface. Unless we talk about a purely command line software (well, technically terminal is also a form of User Interface) then literally the only way User can eXperience your software is through the Interface between the user and the code. Yes - the User Interface 
Without User Interface, only thing you are left with is a source code, either in compiled or raw state. So UI is what defines UX. Bad UI will result in user having bad experience with the software, and vice versa. 
I honestly dislike this whole UX/UI separation thing because in majority of the cases, people use two different acronyms to describe pretty much the exact same thing.
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Ah, sorry bout that, kinda skipped over it
Yep, I guess that would make sense, even if it’s something purely theoretical.
Are you sure you are not confusing UI with features? When BGE was removed, it was not just about BGE button being deleted from the UI, it was actual feature removed.
What you are implying makes little to no sense. You are talking about different feature set requirements for different fields. But most of the features overlap. 2D animation, 3D prints, scientific visualization all have for example basic viewport in common. And I’d argue regardless of the field, artists from all these fields would generally agree on a good basic viewport UI an UX, as how should selection and viewport navigation work.
Again, same thing as I said above could easily apply. You’d take 200 people, 50 from 2D animation, 50 from 3D printing, 50 from scientific viz and 50 from VFX, and then you all sat them in front of the same two version of basic viewport, and then compare which version majority of them likes more. And then you can objectively say which one is better.
What you are doing here is confusing and conflating UI with features, which are two very different things. Features are matter of “can or can not do the task in the software”, while UI is matter of “how easily, how fast or how comfortable I can do the task in the software”
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Sorry. I misread your comment, twice and deleted mine.
I was thinking about UX instead of UI. 
And I skept the “piece of” before the word “software”.
You can measure all these things, but with the exception of the last point, which is about “describe as frustrating”, it’s not all about UX. It is more about Usability.
But most importantly, all this does not tell you whether the user likes the product, whether they will recommend it to others, whether they will want to use it in the future or switch to another one.
For example, product A is ready-made, assembled furniture, and product B is furniture that you need to assemble yourself. Product A will beat B, no need to study, faster and the result is better. But you will like B more, and the next time you will buy B and not A. For example see IKEA.
I just wanted to say that people often use the term User Experience incorrectly.
What can be more of a user experience than experiencing frustration?
The user experience is completely linked to how the user interacts with a product, and in software terms that is the UI. Two softwares with the same functionality and code can have two completely different user experiences, good and bad, with a different interface. It is impossible to deny that UI is a fundamental part of UX, even if we accept a broader meaning of the term UI in reality all design depends on the input and output that a person receives when using a product, even if it is a pair of shoes.
Huh?
At this point you are just playing with subjective interpretation of terms. To me, UX is and usability are synonyms. Usability means how usable something is. User Experience means what experience will you have using the software. If it’s a good experience, you will describe the software as having good usability, and if it’s a bad experience, you will describe the software as having poor usability. Congratulations on introducing third, synonymous term into the conversation.
The IKEA example is a nonsense. If you were standing in a room, and with a single snap of your fingers, you could decide if a completely built, ready to use IKEA wardrobe appears in front of you, or a set of boxes with the same, unbuilt one, both at the exact same price, it’s obvious what majority of people would choose.
The IKEA furniture does not come disassembled because people enjoy building it. It comes disassembled as a cost saving measure, so that it can be sold so cheap, and that’s why it’s so popular, because it’s cheap. If IKEA was offering a service where they deliver the furniture right in your home and build it there for you completely for free, people would be using that service all the time.
And if there were two companies, let’s say IKEA and YKEA, and IKEA was offering exactly what they do, but YKEA was offering the identical furniture for identical prices but with free deliver and assembly right in your home, I am quite confident majority of people would consider YKEA objectively better than IKEA, because they get more value and have to spend less labour and time for the exact same money.
I mean, this argument was so weak it was not worth such a long reply, but I could not help myself 
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They are not synonymous, but they are correlated terms.
- To change the user experience you must change the interface and usability of the program. If you don’t change the interface and usability the user experience will not be modified.
- To change the usability you need to change the UI and the UX. You cannot change the usability of a program without changing the interface, and if the usability changes the UX is also affected.
- Changing the UI necessarily modifies the experience and usability. If you change how the user interacts with the software, both the usability and the experience are changed.
You want to be stronger? You have to modify your musculature. Do you modify your muscles? It will change your strength. It’s simple.
At this point you are just playing with subjective interpretation of terms.
Wikipedia: User experience (UX) is a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service…
ISO 9241-210: User experience - person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service. User experience includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviours and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use. User experience is a consequence of brand image, presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour and assistive capabilities of the interactive system, the user’s internal and physical state resulting from prior experiences, attitudes, skills and personality, and the context of use…
Yeah, and wikipedia in my country tell other thing, and the teachers in university other different. thankfully we live in a world where nobody have a right to tell what a word means.
That allowed blender to be different to the rest of software and better.
So we went from:
(Start) It would be good to have a concrete guideline on how Blender wants UX to be handled
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to
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(Now) thread going up in flames over UI / UX semantics and the same discussions how far or if Blender should be changed at all at this point
Blender 2.8x gained a lot of traction because it switched up certain things and broke with old habits. More and more people got interested since then. I am sure this was in large parts also because of massive UX changes.
What is it about the Blender Community being so open and helpful when it comes to helping others overcome quirks and finding solutions to weird problems in the program but becoming immediately defensive as soon as someone points out that these quirks maybe should be changed to be easier to handle in the first place?
Nobody actually wants Blender to become 100% like [other 3D software]. Most people who propose a feature from a different software just don’t really know how to say it better. What people usually say is:
“Hey - I’ve used this feature in another software and it felt really, really pleasant to work with. Blender is open source and I like using Blender - could we maybe change the feature to behave comparably pleasant?”
Of course they say they want it ‘like that’ - because:
a) usually they are no UI and UX designers but users and…
b) they have seen how [feature X] works in [program x] and see it as the thing they like
Yes. This often interferes with Blender’s UI design. Which brings us back to …
We need guidelines that people can and should adhere to when making feature proposals. That way things are ideally being proposed and designed to work with the Blender way from the ground up.
If someone proposes something that doesn’t work with these guidelines threre would hopefully be a way to discuss and tailor it to actually make it work for Blender.
The way people are getting defensive over changes in the program is the most toxic part.
And just look at the development over the last 2 years. Blender does change things. For the better. But instead of trying to be part of this change and trying to come up with ways to bring it in the right direction for the comunity to be helpful we are now again back at discussing semantics and telling people that features are good the way they are designed.
I’ve actually had someone tell me on Twitter that I just “don’t get” why it’s a good thing that Blender deletes unassigned materials and actions. Without asking. Without a warning.
There really is nothing positive in being different just for the sake of being different. Being different should allow a program to break with conventions and dare to try things new until they are better than others. It should be a way of saying: “We don’t need to stick to covetions that don’t work. We can switch it up. And if it doesn’t work we can dare to discard it.”
And for that cause we need to have a common ground to discuss how a better experience should work. So that we don’t start discussing each person’s own perception of Blender but a concrete basis.
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This is really just a very long way to describe usability A term which could be described by equally as many words, most of them would likely be similar to this description. The fact one term can contain multiple factors does not change absolutely anything.
For example, just the word experience alone can have this complicated description:
Experience is the process through which conscious organisms perceive the world around them.[1][2] Experiences can be accompanied by active awareness on the part of the person having the experience, although they need not be.[3] Experience is the primary subject of various subfields of philosophy, including the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of mind, and phenomenology.
Several different senses of the word “experience” should be distinguished from one another. In the sense of the word under discussion here, “experience” means something along the lines of “perception”, “sensation”, or “observation”. In this sense of the word, knowledge gained from experience is called “empirical knowledge” or “a posteriori knowledge”. This can include propositional knowledge (e.g. finding out that certain things are true based on sensory experience), procedural knowledge (e.g. learning how to perform a particular task based on sensory experience), or knowledge by acquaintance (e.g. familiarity with certain people, places, or objects based on direct exposure to them).
In ordinary language, the word “experience” may instead sometimes refer to one’s level of competence or expertise, either in general or confined to a particular subject. In this sense of the word, “experience” generally refers to know-how rather than propositional knowledge (or in other words, on-the-job training rather than book-learning). This article is not about “experience” in this sense, but is instead about the immediate perception of events.
Yet when we talk about it, we simplify it all under that one word. You seem to have a bit of difficulty with logic here. The statement that “User experience includes all the users’ emotions” is not the same as “User experience is all the users’ emotions”
I don’t disagree with the former, in fact you can see it in what I wrote above:
Notice the point #5. Frustration is an emotion. It’s part of experience. But the feelings alone do not define UX when we talk about it in software context.
You are steering away the conversation from concrete examples of Blender’s UI and UX issues towards debate about meaning of the terms majority of us agree on. This is just hurting the quality of the thread.
I think without specific suggestions (ideally with mockups) threads like these tend to go nowhere. Everyone can agree what blender could be easier for new users but without proposals and design documents people start debating definitions of terms.
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Let us not distort reality, this debate has arisen because the op is trying to belittle what other users are saying, that he is the only one who knows what he is talking about and the rest of us must shut up and nod. And he has used a gigantic display of ignorance as the UX has nothing to do with the UI.
The toxic part today is from those who, from the great ideas of UX design, decided that they were going to eliminate the wireframe from the program because it was unnecessary. As hard as it may be for you to accept. Or that blender doesn’t allow to select through objects because someone doesn’t find enough a button to indicate such functionality