Do you support a drastic change of the User Interface?

This poll seeks to determine whether the (Blenderartists) userbase in principle supports a major revamp of the UI, not any particular UI concept or proposal. Therefore, it’s a simple yes or no.

Please note: This is not a UI debate thread, where the merits of various approaches may be highlighted. In a real-world scenario, users would most likely not be consulted to greenlight specifics anyway.

I voted yes, because in principle i am in favor of a major UI revamp, IF the drastic change is an drastic improvement.

To make this poll a little more clear you might add a definition of what you perceive as a drastic change, since that is highly subjective.

Oh, but it will be a UI debate thread. The answer depends on what would be the purpose of this drastic change and the philosophy behind it. If the goal was to make it friendlier to new users, I would say NO. If the purpose is to make the work faster and easier, then YES. One cannot deny the importance of the philosophy driving the change. I voted yes because I trust Blender’s developers will make the right choice anyway.

Thank you for setting this up. :slight_smile:

To provide some context: This poll resulted from a conversation between me and BeerBaron, starting here.

I voted yes. Of course nobody needs change for the sake of change. But if UI and UX can be significantly improved, streamlined and cleared up by making radical changes - which for example 2.8 is all about - I wholeheartedly endorse those changes, at the expense of having to maybe get used to them for a little while at first. :slight_smile:

Whether any change is an improvement is also subjective. I’m just trying to get the sentiment in the community towards change. Of course everybody has a different idea of what drastic changes is or what benefit it could bring. Some people are more optimistic than others.

It’s not really possible to answer the poll the way it’s phrased. I support improvements to the UI and am ready to live with the incompatibilities and learning. I do not support keeping the UI static just for the sake of maintaining compatibility with old unmaintained addons or existing workflows.

The question is too vague, you might as well be asking “Do you want some things to change for the better?”.

Come off it !! You’ve been here long enough to know where this is heading.

Of course it is, if you understand what I am asking.

Imagine the following:
Blender developers announce massive changes to the UI, for what they believe will be “the better” (of course). You will need to re-learn hotkeys and re-orient yourself around the new UI. That’s a given.

You don’t know what the changes will be, but that doesn’t matter because you have no decision to make anyway. You’re not being asked for permission. The outcome necessarily is uncertain, just like in reality.

The question now is, do you support “change” which you may or may not end up liking want versus “no change” and keeping what you have. Again, the question is which one you prefer in principle. There is no decision to make.

I wouldn’t mind a change. So much jumping in the gui.

depends
what kind of question is this?
are we talking 2.4 > 2.5 kind of drastic or
just tabs kind of drastic?

I think it lacks one answer more, something like “depends on proposal” because if there is no such option then is like asking “do you want to have a job where someone pays you a LOT of money?”… the answer could be yes but when you know the job is about killing people at cold blood with your bare hands maybe you give it another though (ok… an example a bit drastic but you get the point hehe).

I won’t but yes or no as it is right now, I’m on the drastic “depend” group.

Cheers.

I vote yes 2.4 interface was horrible I remember opening blender back in those days and thought…nope this is a mess and started to learn maya instead. After years past I had to open blender in our school since we had 2 weeks course on it and the new interface 2.6(dont remember exact build) was something I didn’t expect at all it was thousand times better than previous and since that course I decided that I start to use blender as my main modelling toolkit.

So in my case trying to improve interface is a good thing it usually drift towards better and if something isn’t working ppl would find way to make it better.

Not quite. Let’s make that analogy work:

If people are drafted into your army at war time, they may be forced to kill (or be killed). If there is no draft, the war effort may be more likely to fail, which could be devastating to your nation. The question now is: Do you support draft “in principle”?

You don’t get to choose the war or whether to start a war or anything. “Only for the good wars!” is not an option in the real world, either. You get to choose a principle. You are making a tradeoff. There’s no correct answer, it’s not a quiz.

If I gave you the option of “it depends”, it would be like asking “would you like something that you like?”. There’s no tradeoff for you, so the only sensible answer would be “yes, I would!”.

That’s one fucking horrible analogy.

Improving UI is like sending people to die in a war?

Talk about a leading question. :smiley:

I think talking about UI changes these days and for Blender in particular is the wrong approach. Instead of talking about changing the UI we should talk about making the UI more adaptable so that everyone can change it according to what he likes and what is best for his workflow. And I have to say that Blender is quite adaptable, much more than most other software that I’ve worked with…

First of all, we don’t even have records on how many people died scrolling through the “UI wars” threads. You weren’t even a member then. It was a bloodbath.

The question is not “Do you support improving the UI?”. That would be a dumb question. Of course the answer to that is “yes”.

I get the feeling that maybe those 75% currently voting for “YES” are actually answering that question instead, because that’s what they want the question to be. They are not seeing the tradeoff.

Utter nonsense, better start eating pebbles and rocks. They contain minerals.
You seem to miss the human history altogether, even the latest chapter of ‘design follows function’ era.

I don’t know. Your question “Do you support a drastic change of the User Interface?” seems pretty unbiased and well-phrased to me.

Indeed, “Do you support improving the UI?” would be a silly question.

But I wouldn’t claim everyone just misunderstood the question because the poll result may be different from what you expected. :slight_smile:

I vote with No.
After 1 year thinking what
the hell is going on here it became the most advanced concept for me compared to every other like c4d,max,maya,vred,ae,premiere,pftrack…Only nuke comes close but has only a small (1) subset of workflows to handle.
My heart always smiles when i switch to an not often used editor like the sequence ed. and the shortcuts simply work.

Node Editor for Compositing, Material Nodes,Animation Nodes etc is simply great.
Only the outliner has a lot of room for performance increase and usability.
Modern vr scenegraph systems like in vred, old rtt deltagen are here benchmark and have around 15x the performance when working with big scenes.

However. The UI learning curve is the flattest known. But you cannot really compare to other tools because blender combines a lot of workflows i needed all the tools already named in this post.
I even think a drastic change is not possible.