The topic is too subjective. Also I find research on such topics is almost always so far removed from reality that they prove useless.
I’m sure I could drudge up hundreds of instances where ui/ux designers quote stuff like this being a good thing. “more ways to do things”, “discoverability”, etc. These are probably the same ui designers that made an utter mess out of windows the past few generations.
How about asking the users? How many people seriously expect to be able to use a piece of 3d production software without a 3 button mouse?. Furthermore, there’s 3-button emulation mode even for then!
Currently blender is undergoing a terrible transformation, in my view, where we’re trying to make everything “discoverable” and “easy to use”.
Except it’s being done by implementing new methods of accessing tools and using features that are prohibitively worse and slower for anyone trying to actually do anything the software is meant to do. For a piece of software designed to produce things, this is ridiculous.
The view gizmos are just another addition to this pot of extra buttons and toolbars designed to be ‘easy to use’ - and ultimately suffer from being slow.
If we really want to help new users, the focus should be on making it easier to learn the current, fast way of doing things - rather than implementing new, slow ways of doing things. I had to wonder the other day why the little view gizmo in the top right was even a thing, it’s such a slow way of moving the view around. I can only console myself with the fact that at least it references the keyboard shortcuts, giving new users a clear path to learning them.
While I probably won’t be using these view navigation guizmos that much I think it’s a great addition.
When working with a tablet ( that is a must if you’re painting , sculpting or doing 2D animation ) I found blender not very easy to navigate, these guizmo allow then to navigate without the keyboard, that nice ! And at least it’s easy to desactivate them, so it’s not a big deal.The good thing with these “slower” tools is that nobody forces you to use them.
I’ve been testing 2.8 for a few days and while there a still a lot to be done, I found it already way better than the 2.7 . It gave me the same feeling than when I switch from 2.49 to 2.5 . Blender is going a step further and I’m sure it will attract more professionals.
At that time many people where skeptical, but I don’t think blender would be as much used now if it was still using the 2.49 interface.
Blender is first aimed at professional and that’s why they are producing animations short with many experienced and long time blender users. Now it’s under big changes and still very theoretical , but with time it will grow into a stronger application that wouldn’t be possible with the 2.5 series.
Every time I’ve used a tablet, one of the buttons on the pen acted as a middle mouse button, navigation wasn’t an issue.
This isn’t about current pros.
It feels like right now, we’re going to end up with a generation of blender users who are the slowest at using the program ever, because they never had reason to learn, or never even knew there was a faster way of doing things. Fixing the ‘shortcut: None’ on the view buttons (my 2.8 version is old, maybe they fixed that) would be a start, but there’s still a ton of things these new toolbars and buttons will encourage users to never learn. Grab, Rotate, Scale? No tooltips on tools anywhere even mentioning these, arguably cornerstones of the way experienced users transform with blender; new users are going to learn the gizmo/manipulator tool and that’s it. Previously users learned because they had to - now there needs to be effort put into making it obvious that you really shouldn’t be using these buttons and tools long-term if you want to be productive.
I’m not really concerned about new users taking bad habits, it’s ok to be slow at first, but experienced blender users won’t die, for sure there will be some tutorials about fast interaction with blender , shortcuts ect…
I don’t think things will change a lot, there was and there always be users with poor abilities, and experienced ones that invest time in learning better techniques. At least , if you want to get a job you need to be efficient .
These interaction tools are also great for professionals coming from other software that just want to do one thing (convert a mesh, do some motion trackingl) . They don’t have time to learn shortcuts or being efficient. They just need to use the software and having a clean, user friendly interface for sure help a lot.
And as with newbies, if they want to use the software more they may dig deeper in faster workflows.
Sometimes i just want to navigate the viewport without having to have the left hand at the keyboard.
The icons are a couple of pixels big, if you think that clutters your viewport, your monitor is too small.
Its optional.
Its consistent.
There is IMHO no valid reason which speaks against it, dev-time excluded.
The functionality is already there, combining it with an icon should not be much work for the devs.
It’s essential to have this! Why?
Because one day you may find yourself in a situation without a keyboard & a mouse, but having a tablet PC and a pen. Comfortably laying in a shadow on a nice summer day. Then instead of being creative you must procreate or curse whoever was opposing this helpful feature.
Anyone can always switch it off, if being bothered by its appearance/ occurrence.
This is a nice experience to understand how an impaired person feels like.
