NathanUp

That seems like a lot of time in firmware! The laptop time is amazing though.

IDK about Lemmy devs, but point 2 is so, so common. Making a point about UX or accessibility in 99% of FLOSS project discussion spaces is incredibly stressful; you can have user research, industry best practice, and years of experience on your side, but you’re inevitably met with dismissal and argument. Devs often treat designers as though they’re a bunch of artsy crystal-healing crusties, despite the fact that good UX people base their work on actual research and theory grounded in human behavior and psychology. (Calling use of basic design principles “eye candy” for example) Of course, if a dev makes a decision on technical grounds, it must be treated as scripture as far as any remaining designers on the project are concerned. It’s no wonder so many FLOSS projects have abominable UX.

Exactly. I once made a point about excessive indicators of visual / information hierarchy increasing cognitive load without additional benefit on a subreddit and got downvoted to oblivion. That was not my opinion; that’s what industry research indicates!

Got to say though, I think GNOME is pretty, but a usability nightmare.

Also, I always have to have a chuckle when I see what clients produce on their own. Like, they’ll cheap out and produce absolute garbage that they’re somehow happy with, but the minute you, a design professional, submit a concept or mockup that is far beyond their ability to produce, the client is absolutely full of feedback: “Make the logo 5x bigger!” “Let’s use this barely visible shade of blue!”

Yea, I think they make honest to god bad design decisions that hurt usability. A common thread is hiding features / reducing discoverability while making no attempt at progressive disclosure, requiring memorization to complete certain tasks with the interface. This isn’t only bad UX, it’s an accessibility issue for users with attention and/or memory deficits. Creating a new paradigm is one thing, but with that comes the task of building affordances that help users with the transition, like skeumorphism did back in the day (…and to an extent, skeumorphism should have never been abandoned in the way it was…), something that the GNOME project simply does not do. They also ignore common accessibility recommendations, for example, by using icons without text in their applications, and utilizing mystery-meat navigation methods like hamburger menus, and ignoring long-established patterns for even very basic tasks, like allowing titlebars to become cluttered with interface elements leading to confusion when the user wants to move the window and widgets are in the way. I don’t think it’s bad at all that the GNOME project is trying to build their own paradigm, but they do so without consideration for the most fundamental usability guidelines.

There are many options; it just takes a bit of creativity, and it’s better to involve the designer in the early planning stages to nail down what needs to be immediately accessible, and what can be revealed via progressive disclosure. I did a website for a beverage company a few years back that used a bottom-aligned series of pills for the navigation that scrolled horizontally - a shadow appeared on the side to indicate that it can be scrolled. (We used JS to add shadow to any side which had overflowing elements. See below for a very rough little wireframe.) Twitter, like many sites and apps, also used to have no hamburger menu if you can remember.

Yea, I get you. That’s why usability research is so important - these interfaces may be simple for you and I, but small issues / contributors to increased cognitive load make a big difference for the large majority of people who do not live and breathe computer interfaces. I get that not everyone can afford to conduct their own studies, but that’s why small orgs (and even modestly funded FLOSS projects) need to be making use of the work of players like the Nielsen Norman group who release their reports very affordably, even if they have an expert on hand. I always try to remember that every interface is contrived, so there is no such thing as an “intuitive” computer or machine interface; interface usability lives or dies with discoverability.

Easiest way to get started at the moment (imo) is to go through the interview to get into MAM, get VIP status, then use the invite threads in the forum to access other trackers.

Now maintaining your ratio however… I’m having a hard time at Orpheus, with a seedbox.

What’s the confusion? They’re just like public ones, but pristinely organized, extremely well seeded, and you’re less likely to get a letter from your ISP for torrenting with them.

I’d sooner rent a VPS than open up ports needlessly on my home network. Yunohost makes it simple to get a Jellyfin instance up and running.