“your program should look and behave exactly like this other program made by a corpo, because I’ve learned that one already”
Oftentimes established workflow is already simple. There’s no need to reinvent this from scratch.
Example: Npainter and AzPainter are heavily inspired by PaintToolSAI.
Inochi Creator is a clone (with unique feature) of Live2D Cubism.
Ehhh flexibility is a good feature to have, but it’s not a requirement for good UX. Good UX should work for both beginner and advanced users, whether you do that through a single UI, different presets, or customizable panels depends on the use case and features available. A good music player for example doesn’t need a highly flexible UI to have good UX.
If anything, a good UX should know what tools people use most and how the rest of the market does theirs to have something that’s transferrable but also that works well with your feature set and brand vision
Not in the example we’re talking about though. Photoshop isn’t simple, nothing in it is. And for the software that is, it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with the better UX. We shouldn’t discourage people from trying to invent something better just because it isn’t what we already have.
I believe when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy.
People loves easy to use interface, not carbon copy of Photoshop, even if they don’t say that. They just don’t know how to articulate their frustration better.
When Affinity Photo emerges as actual Photoshop alternative, no one complains regarding “not being Photoshop clone” because the interface is actually easier than Photoshop, while still being advanced software.
New GIMP user complaining about interface “not being Photoshop clone” is indicator that GIMP interface is not easy to use and intuitive enough.
when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy
And I see with my own eyes how some people are saying exactly that. Sometimes they wrap it into something like “photoshop is intuitive industry standard that takes zero seconds to learn and everyone is born with perfect understanding of it, and everything that isn’t that is an affront to god and actively violates all my senses”. I’m paraphrasing a bit.
There’s always small group of people that prefer certain software and refuse to change, they might even hate when the software gets updated.
Heck, some people even still use obsolete creative softwares despite the development company is dead for almost 20 years.
I conclude that as I’ve been helping people setting their computer as well as teaching people to use various softwares for 15 years :)
I always try to know what things they want to do and their skill level, then recommending software that might be suitable for them. It can be proprietary, but most of the time I tried to recommend FOSS alternative instead.
No. Importance of UX simply means advance users can customize their workflow while making it easy to use for casual users.
Kinda like Krita or Blender. Both are not perfect, but the dev are working on it, together with the community.
Even GIMP dev also working on that, they have GIMP UX issue tracker here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/
Oftentimes established workflow is already simple. There’s no need to reinvent this from scratch. Example: Npainter and AzPainter are heavily inspired by PaintToolSAI. Inochi Creator is a clone (with unique feature) of Live2D Cubism.
Ehhh flexibility is a good feature to have, but it’s not a requirement for good UX. Good UX should work for both beginner and advanced users, whether you do that through a single UI, different presets, or customizable panels depends on the use case and features available. A good music player for example doesn’t need a highly flexible UI to have good UX.
If anything, a good UX should know what tools people use most and how the rest of the market does theirs to have something that’s transferrable but also that works well with your feature set and brand vision
Not in the example we’re talking about though. Photoshop isn’t simple, nothing in it is. And for the software that is, it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with the better UX. We shouldn’t discourage people from trying to invent something better just because it isn’t what we already have.
I believe when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy.
People loves easy to use interface, not carbon copy of Photoshop, even if they don’t say that. They just don’t know how to articulate their frustration better.
When Affinity Photo emerges as actual Photoshop alternative, no one complains regarding “not being Photoshop clone” because the interface is actually easier than Photoshop, while still being advanced software.
New GIMP user complaining about interface “not being Photoshop clone” is indicator that GIMP interface is not easy to use and intuitive enough.
Great insight Nasi!!
And I see with my own eyes how some people are saying exactly that. Sometimes they wrap it into something like “photoshop is intuitive industry standard that takes zero seconds to learn and everyone is born with perfect understanding of it, and everything that isn’t that is an affront to god and actively violates all my senses”. I’m paraphrasing a bit.
That’s why I said “majority of people.”
There’s always small group of people that prefer certain software and refuse to change, they might even hate when the software gets updated. Heck, some people even still use obsolete creative softwares despite the development company is dead for almost 20 years.
I don’t know what majority of people think. To be fair, you also don’t know that. We can only guess
I conclude that as I’ve been helping people setting their computer as well as teaching people to use various softwares for 15 years :)
I always try to know what things they want to do and their skill level, then recommending software that might be suitable for them. It can be proprietary, but most of the time I tried to recommend FOSS alternative instead.