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Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

neil.computer

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Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#291

Post by oblio »

thund wrote: post #226

Solution: make UI 100% theme-able. Icons, buttons, paddings, borders, fonts, backgrounds, everything as a customizable theme. The community will do the rest.

Well: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/06/addressing-the-new-u...

> The new UI will remain customizable. It is, and will be, possible to change many aspects of the look and feel, such as icons, colors, font sizes, and spacing between controls through theme plugins. We’ll add options as needed to accommodate user preferences, like the ability to customize the toolbar.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#292

Post by dudeinjapan »

wiseowise wrote: post #123
dudeinjapan wrote: post #81

This happens when a company hires new product managers who don't give a hoot about what made the product originally great to begin with. I call it "Skypeification"

What made product originally great? Features, not UI.

Products become great by being "mission-oriented": they help their users achieve a goal. Often the UI evolves organically based on user feedback and becomes "locally-optimized" for the user's workflow.

When you get a PM/Designer who insists on following the design principles they learned on YouTube, they tend to throw out the UI along with all the implicit knowledge accumulated within it. This is related to Chesterton's Fence https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#293

Post by matsemann »

mcluck wrote: post #274
matsemann wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm not "rewarding the post with hundred of points", but I've upvoted because I share the sentiment and want JetBrains to really consider each change they make: Is it for change's sake, or because it's actually better ?

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Given UX has never been a major priority at JetBrains, it implies that they decided it was valuable enough to spend the time and money on this. I just can't imagine this was done on a whim

Because the new UX feels more geared towards looking like VSCode, than actually improving things.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#294

Post by jdbernard »

mcluck wrote: post #274
matsemann wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm not "rewarding the post with hundred of points", but I've upvoted because I share the sentiment and want JetBrains to really consider each change they make: Is it for change's sake, or because it's actually better ?

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Given UX has never been a major priority at JetBrains, it implies that they decided it was valuable enough to spend the time and money on this. I just can't imagine this was done on a whim

This isn't really JetBrains fault, but the track record of products making full redesigns is bad enough that we do tend to assume that the priorities, values, and considerations of UX professionals run contrary to developers/users priorities, to the point where the result is often less useful/ergonomic than what it replaced.

To be fair, this tendency to prioritize your own values above those of your users is not unique to designers. For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace."

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#296

Post by lars_francke »

irrational wrote: post #100
lars_francke wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch branches? Let's index it all again! Working on a Rust project? Let's index the Go stdlib. It'll be ready in 10-20 min, please hold. I've been waiting for indexing improvemence for over 10 years, not holding my breath.

Do I just have a really fast computer (I’m using a MacBook Pro)? I’ve never experienced this indexing issue.

Maybe. I used to be on MacBook Pros back in the days when I was working on Java and indexing was the bane of my existence. I usually worked with 3-10 big Java projects in parallel (e.g. HBase, Hadoop, Hive, NiFi, Kafka) and indexing could (not exaggerating) take up to 4 hours in total. NiFi is one of the worst offenders. And switching branches means it starts all over again.

I haven't worked with Java in ~2 years so I'm not sure how bad it is now. I might start a NiFi index job just for fun...

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#297

Post by Olreich »

mcluck wrote: post #274
matsemann wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm not "rewarding the post with hundred of points", but I've upvoted because I share the sentiment and want JetBrains to really consider each change they make: Is it for change's sake, or because it's actually better ?

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Given UX has never been a major priority at JetBrains, it implies that they decided it was valuable enough to spend the time and money on this. I just can't imagine this was done on a whim

I think you would be shocked at how often UX designers get greenlit to make a refresh based on vague things like the current code base being hard to use or keeping up with the Joneses of other products or just to have new marketing pictures that look "modern". The default assumption that this effort was made without proper consideration is right more often than its wrong.

Maligning the devs? Not so much. Wanting them to show their work and explain why they think looking more like VSCode is a good idea? Very much so.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#300

Post by forgotmypw17 »

faizshah wrote: post #52

Eh, I have used vim, spacemacs, sublime, vscode, atom, eclipse and netbeans. Jetbrains IDEs have superior functionality out of the box across languages and don’t require me to mess with and debug a million plugins. I don’t mind a UI refresh, it’s going to be just like the gmail refresh everyone hated it and now we’re all fine with it. I just wish they would invest more money into things that are actually a problem cu…

> it’s going to be just like the gmail refresh everyone hated it and now we’re all fine with it.

I'm not fine with it. It's still an accessibility DF for me, and I use HTML mode, despite it being semi-broken.

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