I think this is a needlessly combative stance. If your goal is to get new users to engage with the development side, calling their criticism “bitching” isn’t going to do that. Most software users don’t have the first clue about software development and wouldn’t even know what exactly to say if given a suggestion form. The best feedback a lot of new users can give is “the user experience is clunky and unintuitive”.
My stance has been forged by the repeated disappointing interactions that I’ve had with people who I spend painstaking amounts of time illustrating how to solve their problems with these tools and why a certain design quirk is the way it is vs. the proprietary model.
Without fail, the kinds of users like the screenshotted poster will look at me with a blank face or reply in forum chats with the same statement: “But can’t they just make it usable like [enshittified software] instead?”
How can we bridge this gap? At least to the point where users can give constructive feedback like “I wanted to do this thing, and searched for a way here and here. It took me hours to figure out how to do it. It would have been intuitive if…” Maybe we will have to be proactive about UX issues and have proper channels for this information?
One issue I see with suggestions is that everyone thinks their a designer. What they suggest might even be an improvement for that one small tool but would make the overall experience less intuitive. Overall, I think OSS should cater to their existing users plus a little bit more. Make the experience better for the people who really want to try to use it but eventually give up in frustration. Over time, it will improve and the user base will increase.
I think this is a needlessly combative stance. If your goal is to get new users to engage with the development side, calling their criticism “bitching” isn’t going to do that. Most software users don’t have the first clue about software development and wouldn’t even know what exactly to say if given a suggestion form. The best feedback a lot of new users can give is “the user experience is clunky and unintuitive”.
My stance has been forged by the repeated disappointing interactions that I’ve had with people who I spend painstaking amounts of time illustrating how to solve their problems with these tools and why a certain design quirk is the way it is vs. the proprietary model.
Without fail, the kinds of users like the screenshotted poster will look at me with a blank face or reply in forum chats with the same statement: “But can’t they just make it usable like [enshittified software] instead?”
How can we bridge this gap? At least to the point where users can give constructive feedback like “I wanted to do this thing, and searched for a way here and here. It took me hours to figure out how to do it. It would have been intuitive if…” Maybe we will have to be proactive about UX issues and have proper channels for this information?
One issue I see with suggestions is that everyone thinks their a designer. What they suggest might even be an improvement for that one small tool but would make the overall experience less intuitive. Overall, I think OSS should cater to their existing users plus a little bit more. Make the experience better for the people who really want to try to use it but eventually give up in frustration. Over time, it will improve and the user base will increase.