> I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field
Spot on. Devs have on average extreme levels of confidence in unrepresentative opinions (space bar heating) and think UI is beneath them.
> FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla) are used almost exclusively by other developers
Nobody is better at pissing away hard labor like devs. There are these amazing OSS projects with 10ks of man hours invested, that won’t let designers near their cluttered prototype ui, if any. Designers are meme-famous as working for free - harnessing their power in FOSS would be akin to convincing a child to eat ice cream. Yet they’re unable to.
Note this is not only UI, but general theory of mind skills. How many times have you read a README on GitHub where it’s written like the most over-cryptic nonsense, despite being quite general and straight forward projects under the hood? My working theory is UI skills and “explaining things” are fruits from the same tree. Most devs don’t practice it, so they get deep into curse of knowledge territory. Even the smart have blindspots, maybe especially them.
Spot on. Devs have on average extreme levels of confidence in unrepresentative opinions (space bar heating) and think UI is beneath them.
> FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla) are used almost exclusively by other developers
Nobody is better at pissing away hard labor like devs. There are these amazing OSS projects with 10ks of man hours invested, that won’t let designers near their cluttered prototype ui, if any. Designers are meme-famous as working for free - harnessing their power in FOSS would be akin to convincing a child to eat ice cream. Yet they’re unable to.
Note this is not only UI, but general theory of mind skills. How many times have you read a README on GitHub where it’s written like the most over-cryptic nonsense, despite being quite general and straight forward projects under the hood? My working theory is UI skills and “explaining things” are fruits from the same tree. Most devs don’t practice it, so they get deep into curse of knowledge territory. Even the smart have blindspots, maybe especially them.