Electronics > Altium Designer
Altium REJECTS takeover bid from Autodesk
nctnico:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 27, 2021, 10:24:53 pm ---Use true UX professionals, observing actual professionals using various EDA tools, to make the user interface efficient. Forums like EEVBlog are a good source for ideas to test. The UX is what makes a package stand out, since any other proprietary EDA vendor can create their own as an upgrade from the free package;
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That won't work because for the occasional PCB layouter an intuitive UI will be the most productive where such a UI will only get in the way of someone doing PCB design all day.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: nctnico on August 27, 2021, 10:59:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 27, 2021, 10:24:53 pm ---Use true UX professionals, observing actual professionals using various EDA tools, to make the user interface efficient. Forums like EEVBlog are a good source for ideas to test. The UX is what makes a package stand out, since any other proprietary EDA vendor can create their own as an upgrade from the free package;
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That won't work because for the occasional PCB layouter an intuitive UI will be the most productive where such a UI will only get in the way of someone doing PCB design all day.
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I can remember doing a KiCAD first impressions video and pointing out all sorts of thing that might suck for daily use, and I got hammered for it. All the people complaining about my comments I'm sure had never worked 8 hours a day every day for 2 months on a single PCB as a full time PCB professional ::)
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: nctnico on August 27, 2021, 10:59:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 27, 2021, 10:24:53 pm ---Use true UX professionals, observing actual professionals using various EDA tools, to make the user interface efficient. Forums like EEVBlog are a good source for ideas to test. The UX is what makes a package stand out, since any other proprietary EDA vendor can create their own as an upgrade from the free package;
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That won't work because for the occasional PCB layouter an intuitive UI will be the most productive where such a UI will only get in the way of someone doing PCB design all day.
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No, the free/non-professional package targets occasional/hobbyists. For the professional tools, you want the interface to be efficient and productive. The two are orthogonal.
--- Quote from: EEVblog on August 27, 2021, 11:05:43 pm ---I can remember doing a KiCAD first impressions video and pointing out all sorts of thing that might suck for daily use, and I got hammered for it. All the people complaining about my comments I'm sure had never worked 8 hours a day every day for 2 months on a single PCB as a full time PCB professional ::)
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That's exactly why I said one needs to observe how actual professionals do use their tools, before you can even start making a truly effective interface.
What people say is not what they do; and those with the least know-how are often the most vocal. Those who know, know how complex the situation is, so when there is no simple answer, they just prefer to stay out of the mess.
Observing the actual process and tasks, when the observee knows what they're doing, is how you capture the useful practical knowledge.
Hobbyists and professionals use tools in a completely different way. To hobbyists, ease of use and intuitiveness is important; that way the use is more like playing with something. Professionals need to get shit done with as little conscious effort as possible, so that they can direct their efforts where it matters the most.
The ideas for user interfaces one collects, are just that: tentative suggestions to try, not something you adopt immediately. They do need to be experimented on in practice, preferably with the exact kind of users the tool is supposed to target, before their value can be ascertained. Even if the idea is from a professional, there may be unseen consequences or side effects that make it impractical.
Practice beats theory, every time.
Fact is, the split is such that a single EDA package can no longer fully cater to both professionals and hobbyists. The cheap prototyping services were the key to bring this about. A hobbyist is not going to pay $100 for a license so they can design a $5 PCB or two; and they're not going to want to spend much time learning a tool for a similar reason. Plus, hobbies are supposed to be fun.
Yet, as we know, hobbies often end up affecting ones career, and open up new opportunities.
So, to capture a larger share of the professional tool market, you need to provide a path for the hobbyists to upgrade to the professional tools, if and when they have obtained the necessary skill.
In the past, it sufficed to make sure your tool is the one used in educating new engineers. This still applies to e.g. office software. At this point and in the future, relying on that to capture the market share may be too late, because the next generation of EEs is likely to know a range of several EDA tools and not just the one they used at school.
tooki:
--- Quote from: olkipukki on August 27, 2021, 09:30:24 am ---
--- Quote from: floobydust on August 22, 2021, 07:03:45 pm ---
I've used both Photoshop and GIMP. GIMP is the best way to kill someone, the user interface is so consistently terrible (try draw a circle) that I laugh everytime I use it. But it works, no fees or subscription and not locked into Windows or the cloud. It's a tool and I don't mind lesser features for lesser bullshit.
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Its not too bad, you can still find alternatives
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
I'm using these products a few years on both Win and Mac after give up on Adobe Creative Suite, paid once and still receiving updates (!!!), although don't mind pay for a next version upgrade
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Yep. I’ve been using the Affinity products for years now, since my personal needs do not come close to requiring Adobe. They work well for everything I need to do.
For non-professional use there are tons of options. (My original claim was against people claiming that the OSS packages were complete replacements for the big commercial apps, and I maintain that they are not complete, because they lack features that are critical to professional users. Not every pro user needs every one of those pro features, but without all of them, another tool is not a complete replacement.)
--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on August 27, 2021, 11:53:12 am ---Are we not slightly confusing things here? Apart from no longer talking Altium or Autodesk, I mean! ISTM there are two aspects to 'professional' wordsmithing: figuring out what you want to say and making it look how you want (hopefully nice). The tools for each need distinct and different features, so you might well have one tool for writing the stuff and another for outputting the result. Someone arguing that X is fantastic (for collating material and organising it) maybe won't agree when someone else insists Y is far, far superior for (layout and stuff).
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This!!! Absolutely correct, and something I touched on earlier. That’s why I say that Word is a great writing tool. I never said it’s a great layout tool. I feel that a lot of people who hate Word are trying to use it for desktop publishing, which isn’t what its focus is.
Heck, in my daily home/school use, I use Word for writing, but usually Apple Pages for precise layouts. (I can’t justify spending $$$ for Adobe, though it would give me more control.)
tooki:
--- Quote from: nctnico on August 27, 2021, 10:59:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 27, 2021, 10:24:53 pm ---Use true UX professionals, observing actual professionals using various EDA tools, to make the user interface efficient. Forums like EEVBlog are a good source for ideas to test. The UX is what makes a package stand out, since any other proprietary EDA vendor can create their own as an upgrade from the free package;
--- End quote ---
That won't work because for the occasional PCB layouter an intuitive UI will be the most productive where such a UI will only get in the way of someone doing PCB design all day.
--- End quote ---
I think intuitiveness and productiveness are orthogonal. Bearing in mind that I used to work as a UX designer, I think it is possible to design interfaces that have pro-level productivity but are intuitive to new or infrequent users. First of all, intuitive ≠ simplistic. Pro apps have inherent complexity and that can’t be magically eliminated. But neither should pro apps have to tolerate obtuse interfaces (which is often very much implicitly claimed when people argue in support of bad pro interfaces).
To me, a great example of an intuitive pro interface was the old Final Cut Pro. (The ones before the newly developed Final Cut Pro X series, which I have no experience with. I’m not saying that X is harder to use, I simply do not know.) FCP’s interface was so well designed that new users could sit down and quickly become productive, but also had true pro functionality rivaling incumbent systems (like Avid) that had a much steeper learning curve. It had pro-level keyboard shortcuts, so that full-time users could be extremely productive with it. But unlike the harder apps, you didn’t have to memorize them right away in order to accomplish even basic tasks.
Another is Adobe InDesign: within a few years of release, it dethroned the incumbent leading desktop publishing program (Quark Xpress) with the one-two punch of being a better product (having a much better user interface and much better support for then-“modern” features and technologies like alpha transparency, advsnced typography, Unicode, etc.) and for treating its customers far better than Quark did. (Oh, the irony…) InDesign was also easier to use than Adobe’s own existing DTP program, PageMaker.
Anyhow, what I’m definitely not saying is that an intuitive interface is a dumbed-down one. I’m also not saying that a pro app should cater to people with no subject knowledge. A pro app also has every right to expect its users to understand established industry jargon. (In contrast, a consumer app might use a more “everyday” description for the same thing, like how a desktop publishing program will say “leading” while a word processor will say “line spacing”.)
The difficulty in creating great application interfaces is that it takes a ton of effort: from in-depth user observation and testing (as others have already said), to investing lots of time in designing and coding a UI (since good interfaces use code to figure many things out on their own, so the user doesn’t have to tell it redundant information, while still offering a way to change it if need be), but also because a truly good interface dictates some of the internal architecture of the program. Many bad UIs are the result of being a GUI bolted onto an application engine that wasn’t designed for that GUI. This remains a huge issue with legacy systems that were originally designed for batch processing or text-mode terminals. The architecture of the app engine for an interactive graphical interface will be fundamentally different from those. And even within natively GUI apps, the internal architecture depends a lot on the interface semantics.
Often times, the resources to make a truly great GUI app simply aren’t there. Or you don’t want to take the risk entailed by a complete re-engineering of an existing program. (A very valid argument in many cases; that’s why software in industries like banking, insurance, and aerospace, for instance, tends to change things very conservatively and slowly.) And existing GUI programs don’t want to change so much as to alienate existing users, even if the new UI is objectively (as proven empirically in user testing) easier and faster to use for both new and experienced users! (As Microsoft learned with Office 2007.) So you end up with an interface that’s good enough, but eludes excellence.
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