UI/UX has seemingly many times been neglected by many open source projects, especially those that are supposed to be for end users that might not be developers themselves. It's easy as a programmer to kind of guess where the functionality should be based on previous experiences (with similar but different software) when you're using it, while many end users don't really think about the patterns and gets a grimmer user experience. This is why we need more designers getting into open source design. Open source can be competitive with paid solutions, we all know it's true for everything from OSes up to CLI tools. But once you slap a UI on it, which requires end-user focus for the UX, we developers tend to drop the ball.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I recently started a project where, since I'm not a designer, I'm trying to get designers onboard to help out with everything design. So far we had some people, which is nice, shows that there is willingness in designers to do open source work. Hardest so far is for me as a non-designer to understand the best workflows for designers to collaborate on design. Figma helps us a lot to collaborate, but it's just one piece of the puzzle. I'm sure there is more we can do to facilitate designers to help out with open source projects, we just have to find a "send patch / pull request" workflow that works for designers, just as we did for developers. Once we have some workflow nailed down, it can hopefully be replicated to other open source communities in order to have more designers collaborate with developers on open source.