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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

>> GIMP is the perfect example of why companies hire UX designers.

Whole I agree that this is UX design, but I suspect that UX can be (and often is) a product of the type of organisation producing it moreso than the "UX designer hired to do UX." UX for something like Gimp is very hard. The metaphors have to encompass a ton of stuff and the UX needs

A web app created by a bank, electric company or somesuch will tend to be different from an app created by an SV-ish company in a pretty predictable way. Similarly, Gimp seems like a relative of other GNU/OSS software... Calibre comes to mind.

Different types of organisations or ways of doing things have different strengths and weaknesses. Th

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Calibre may not be pretty but for a CRUD app it is usable. People who have complaints about Calibre generally have issues with its chrome and dated layout but nobody dislikes it because it is hard to use. A default GTK style UI always looks terrible on Windows and Mac, both of which have much higher requirements for user interface defaults. This is especially so with Amazon and iBooks setting differing expectations for how an eReader should look like. The issue with GIMP is with both its UI and its UX. Trying to get work done in GIMP is difficult and challenging. It is not a mere CRUD app like Calibre.

People like Calibre. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just using it as a type example. Gnu-ish software is different in a recognizable way from Google, MSFT, etc. Different enough that both strengths and weaknesses are different.

With Calibre, most users won't feel like they have a grasp of what the software is and what you can do with it... compared to an Apple product. But, it's super powerful and the answer to a lot of "how do I X?" queries is use calibre. Without calibre, the operative answer would probably be "you can't."

While I like and appreciate Calibre, its a fantastically useful piece of software and I use it all the time, its UI veers closer to outsider art than what could be considered best-practice interface design.

GIMP, however, is more like when an ecosystem is cut off for millions of years and there’s no natural predators so things evolve in strange and highly localised ways.

GIMP is the duck-billed platypus of software.

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