I’m a UX product designer and a major issue I’ve encountered within FOSS is extremely opinionated developers, who regularly sacrifice usability for features and configurability, which is instantly off-putting to a general audience.
I’m painting a very broad picture there, and I’m not criticising - I’m a staunch advocate for Linux and FOSS in general, the technical execution and intent is usually brilliant.
Apple is extremely opinionated in their design by limiting options and complexity, that’s one way they achieve a solid foundation, by offering few options (both in terms of software and hardware). They don’t make their users think too hard.
There’s plenty of low hanging fruit that could be addressed (use of plain language, clear actions, other tried and tested design principles) but that’s not enough, and it often relies on strong UI dev skills, which the team doesn’t necessarily have.
I’ve seen some appetite for making FOSS projects easier for a general audience, but things fall flat when it comes to making hard decisions (stripping out or hiding complexity, making decisions to promote simplicity, spending considerable effort on UI instead of features).
I’d love to be more involved in it, and maybe I’m being unfair, but it can be demoralising work for a designer.
Tacking “Reddit” onto search queries almost became a prerequisite. Never imagined I’d have to replace that with “-Reddit”.
It’s made researching a media centre setup very difficult this week…