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BITKARROT | 3 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 I guess I'm  pretty masochistic, i was made to do both from a young age.  Never gave up on it either. 

what i'm saying is you don't need to be an expert at both but some understanding and basic training on the design side would surely make it a lot easier to coordinate with the technical. i keep hearing devs complain about the designers they work with......

and i often think huh, if they only understood the gap. but that only happens when you train both sides.
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laanwj | 3 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 yes it was more tongue-in-cheek 😀  i don't disagree, i do think the more demands you make from people the less contributors you're going to find, discourse is so often "developers need to be X too" at some point it's unicorn hunting

also something i think is important to keep in mind that "UI design" is a separate specialization from general design, after all it's about designing usable and safe interactive user interfaces (with concepts like discoverability), not just things that look pretty, a lot of mobile app developers forget this

i think the biggest problem with usability in FOSS software isn't so much lack of expertise but that people won't listen, design requires a more dictatorial architectural mindset and thinking at a higher level of abstraction, while FOSS is more decentralized "oh some user wants a feature, let's bolt it on here" (not just FOSS, commercial software often has this problem too, especially longer running projects)