What is userfriendly ?

Though this thread is closed I really liked to give my opinion and maybe start a discussion on a more constructive ground.
I am referring to this thread.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/people-told-me-this-was-user-friendly.318281/

I am new to Unity3D and I fight my own personal fight with the problems.

However I think userfriendliness of a program should be defined on the complexity of topic it covers. While I agree that learning to make games is not easy and timeconsuming, I also would like to point out it is a very very complex topic. So to put a lot of time to learn is a default I think. So programs like Blender and Unity3D should be judged from a neutral point of view. Means, ok, I know I am trying to cover a complex topic. How userfriendly is the program helping me to cover my problems.

I think it is totally clear that I cannot expect results before 6 months pass in a complex matter, with no game engine, except some click wysiwig engines. However, those are very very limited and no comparison to Unity3D for example. Who expects different simply entered the wrong field I would dare to say or maybe has huge experience already in a special field, like for example a programmer with C#.

So I think userfriendliness is very relative and is based on how good are the forums for these programs, how friendly is the community (there are some terrible and aggressive communities out there I tell you) and of course how good is their documentation and how much does the program cost.

I think in all these points Unity3D excels and I would call it userfriendly from this point of view.

 

User Friendly (n)
1) A piece of software that does not make the user click, scroll, type, or anything else. Error messages are not allowed. In the case that an unexpected error occurs, it must start with please and end with thank you. The software must do everything the user needs, but they must not have to click, scroll, type, or anything else.

That's what it seems to mean where I work.

More seriously, I think unity is very user friendly because the interface is clean and well designed. For example, a mesh field allows you to drag a mesh from the explorer straight into the field rather than opening a file window to browse for the file. You can still browse for a file, but the browser allows you to filter results rather than scrolling through pages upon pages of data. Some settings do seem buried, but they're obscure settings to begin with.

More examples:

Blender is very user unfriendly, not because of the user interface, but because you need a cheat sheet to know what keys do what and the cheat sheet is like 4 pages long.

ZBrush on the other hand is very user friendly, it probably has as many, if not more keybinds than blender, but holding Ctrl will show the shortcuts for each button on the screen and hovering over any option gives you a tooltip with help.

Sketchup (to me) is terribly user unfriendly because there are no shortcut letters on any option and they went with some crappy middle mouse button pan/rotate/move rather than the seemingly standard WASD controls that everything else seems to use now.

Visual Studio - Very user friendly because there are smart tooltips everywhere and context sensitive mouse actions, plus intellisense and the like. Once you master it, you can type entire lines of code in 1/10th of the keystrokes that it should take.

User friendliness is about making your users use your software in a natural way, in a way that they expect things to behave. The main problem with creating user friendliness is all the stinking users' stinking opinions. If your users stare at your software and say "uhhhh, what do i do?" then its probably unfriendly. If they can start clicking around and start causing trouble right away then its user friendly. Note that this requires the caveat that the user know *something* about the topic before opening the software. If I open 3ds max and can't use it, that's probably my fault because I don't know a thing about 3d modeling. If I open visual studio for the first time, I should be able to find my way around easily because I know quite a bit about programming.

 

@delinx32 I hated Sketchup too, hehe. And yes Blender is not sooo userfriendly, but then ZBrush is playing in the league of expensive programs.

However I was more trying to point out that some people expect a program to do all their work, even if covering a huge complex field, and not understanding, that userfriendliness does not mean you don't have to put quite your share of time to learn it anyway. So I was referring to the closed post.

But I surely support also all you wrote here delinx32.

 

User friendly implies

• Minimum number of clicks to get the job done
• Intuitive shortcuts
• Works on non standard hardware (Ever try Blender on a touch pad grrrr!)
• Well documented
• Adheres to industry standards

User friendly also is very dependent on the target user. Unity assumes the user is a game developer. There is a certain level of coding ability implied. On the other hand my three year old should be able to figure out the interface for paint or a browser.

 

I've noticed kids have a tendency to become better at computers far faster than the adults though. My nephew, who is not quite three yet, knows how to open the browser's history to visit places he has already been to. He can navigate around the Windows 7 Start Menu well enough to find games he enjoys.

 

@BoredMormon I think that is short and concise to the point While all you point out is important I would like to support the "industry Standard" most, that is for me the superkiller for a software, even if it excels in all your other points. I mean if I am given a quirky software that produces standard files I will turn to that over the one with the best interface that gives out glibbering proprietary files.

 

I was actually looking at the interface rather then the file format, but the same principle applies. Many of us use Microsoft products all of the time. The standard shortcuts like ctrl+C to copy or ctrl+Z or right clicking for a contextual menu are so ingrained in users that anything else is painful. If you are on a Mac your software should use whatever wacky conventions they use over there. Under no circumstances should you try and force users to learn some new convention just for your software.

(I'm looking at blender, that tries to run Mac conventions on a PC. Or Windows 8, that tries touch screen conventions without a touch screen. Or lately the Unity home page, that totally ignores the convention of the scroll bar making browser content go up and down.)

It all depends on what you are exposed too. I grew up coding macros for my father in Lotus 123, and later VBA for excel. I've never had a real problem since getting my head around how code works.

My three and five year old are crazily competent on touch screen devices, and have been since about two years old. Starting to go off topic here, but we had a couple of cute moments when the kids were younger and we gave them a laptop or TV instead of the touch screen device. They would consistently try to change channels by swiping the screen.

 

Haha, my 2 year old has discovered siri on the ipad and now presses buttons and yells "COOKIE" or "BERRIES" into them expecting pictures to appear.

 

I guess, figure out what an 'unfriendly' game would be like, and don't do it.

Also `usability` is a very big part of this. I recommend the book 'dont make me think'. If you make people have to think to figure out how to USE your game, there is a problem.

 

Also just wanted to add that, although often forgotten these days, it used to be more readily known that something being 'intuitive' was important.... that means, you don't have to really think that much to figure out how to bridge the gap between yourself and what the computer requires you to do. You don't want to have to be making up for the computer not speaking your language, or not understanding you. You don't want to have to be doing the work of translating what you want to happen into making it happen through some long convoluted or complicated or unobvious interface. Things should be clear, readable, symbolic, well defined/distinguished, no clutter, get rid of the noise, take the most direct path possible, and gradually teach the user what they need to know.

 

User friendly for me is a software that simplifies my work, unity excels at it so i can work faster

 

While the topic was more about software we use, I think we might also need to think how we make the products we create with Unity3D userfriendly. So yes, well spoken @imaginaryhuman. It is incredible how complicated some userinterfaces are out there for games. I would say, userfriendliness with a game is more important even with games than applications. People play games for fun and will possibly drop a game fast if it makes them think too much how to use it.

 

I would even go so far to seriously question some features for a game that can't be implemented with an easy interface in a game, whether they should be implemented. If it is not obvious, complicated or needs more than one click or a list of 30 different letters on the keyboard .... maybe one should think about making the game less complex. Also what other games use, should be compared with. There are meanwhile quasi standards for certain buttons, like WASD for movement, M for map, I for inventory and TAB for a general overview of all background actions like M,I, etc that let you access the subpages in case you forgot one of the letters. This is mainly for RPG's, but I see that any game that has movements uses WASD. I think gamedesigners should try to follow such quasi standards. While I normally avoid a to copy from other games and go great leangths to be original, the user interface is surely NOT the place to be original I think it is a good plan to play 1 or 2 of the latest AAA games of the genre you want to publish and copy their keys.

 

It's based on principle.

Not user friendly:
You have to go into the script and manually change the configuration type.
User friendly:
There is a dropdown in the inspector that lets you choose which one you want and the script does the rest.

If some particular change in the interface or design can give the same result or better but will take workload and complication away from the user then that change will increase user friendliness.

There isn't an explicitly defined "User Friendly" standard or stamp of approval. It's just a matter of if the interface or program is easy for the user to operate and manipulate to the extent of its purpose.

Not user friendly:

Code (csharp):

1. Vector3 weaponLocation = gameObject.GetComponent<CharacterStats>().weaponInfo.mountObject.transform.position;
2.  

User Friendly:

Code (csharp):

1. Vector3 weaponLocation = gameObject.GetComponent<CharacterStats>().MountPos();
2.  

 

If a 10 year old can't use it, it is NOT user friendly.

 

Based on my own experiences and watching others learn, many kids will pick up the technology far faster than someone much older. If you're targeting children then I feel you're better off focusing on making the device more durable and crash proof than actually trying to make a superior interface.

As an adult I've found myself less "Oh let's try this button" and more "Oh there's the button with the text I expected".

 

In fact I'd say "intuitive everything" (implying consistency) by which I mean - when the user has a sense for how the core of an application works it's easy to use new or different features based upon establishes usability standards.

 

Making games = not user friendly.

 

I would not go that far, I mean some games and application need an adult to understand the action. So we have to take care that we don't mix up userfriendly with simplified ...

 

It's all relative to the user.

A calculus dirivative helper may be incredibly user friendly and amazing to someone used to doing it all by hand, but the symbols and input fields confuse someone whom stumbled upon the topic and wants to give it a shot.

Later the Algebra 1 student complains that the calculus helper application isn't user friendly.

 

yes, you cant get oversimplified a complex task(like videogames), just dont make it harder that it should be

 

@delinx32 :
You're mixing up a few things there. Mostly "user friendly" and "intuitive".

Intuitive design means that the application works exactly as one would come to expect. You install it open it and are able to use it without needing any training. It guides you through, it's self explanatory, it's intuitive.
Modern Smartphone operating systems are intuitive. MS Paint is intuitive.

When you're talking about user friendly design, you're talking about applications that make sure their users get to do what they want, without the application getting in their way.
The biggest difference is that user friendliness takes the target audience into account.
Modern smartphone operating systems MS Paint are also user friendly.

However, user friendly applications aren't necessarily intuitive.

Both of them depend on what exactly it is that the user wants to do. MS Paint stops being intuitive and user friendly very fast, if the user wants to do professional image manipulation. It wasn't designed for this sort of usage.


Example:
Claiming that Blender is not user friendly is absurd. It's extremely user friendly, just not intuitive by any means. This has to do with Blender's target audience. Blender is not baby's first modeling tool. It's designed for professionals and around their needs.
Having some random guy download Blender and produce something withing the two hours before he gets bored was never a priority.

(On a side note: Firstly, you don't need to memorize 4 pages worth of hotkeys in order to use Blender. You'd be hard pressed to fill even a single one.
Secondly, Blender's UI concept allows you to do (almost) everything in three ways: Using only your keyboard, using only your mouse and using both.)

Then how is the software going to do anything, if the developers want it to be user friendly by your definition?

SketchUp has even bigger problems than hotkeys, to be honest.
"What everything else uses" also falls under intuitive design. As long as the application doesn't get in your way when doing viewport navigation (which is something you'll do a lot), it's user friendly.
Scene view navigation in Unity is absolutely terrible. Since I'm typing on my smartphone, I won't go into detail until I get back from University.
User friendliness in Unity is a double edged sword in general. But I'll come back to this later.

This is the very definition of intuitive design, which has is not the same thing as user friendliness.

Not necessarily.
This depends on your target audience. If you target absolute amateurs, you'd better make sure that your design is intuitive and guide them through.

 

Hmm, I'd never thought to make a distinction between user friendliness and intuitiveness. But the distinction does raise some interesting new ways to look at the topic.

My main focus on user interfaces has almost always been safety related, so making something intuitive and mistake proof is always the priority.

 

I'm not particularly user friendly.

 

... but are you intuitive?

 

But we already knew that.

 

I'm ENTJ if that helps!

 

You cannot be user friendly and unintuitive. That's a contradiction. Those two terms goes hand in hand.

Blender is neither user friendly nor intuitive.

Speaking of the target audience, Blender is definitely not designed for professionals and their needs. Professionals uses usually everything else but Blender for various reasons. The main user base are the hobbyists. But even this is not the target audience. The target audience is the Blender developers themselves. Blender is purely designed for the Blender programmers. It's their playground. And that's where the cruel UI comes from. It's a typical open source disease that everthing else is more important than UI and usability. Feature works, here is space for the menu entry. That's good enough, on with next cool feature ...

 

*sigh*
I will just act like you didn't post this part until you change your mind and decide to actually back it up. It's just annoying when you decide do a lengthy post, explain your thought-process in detail so everyone can follow, then someone comes around and just says "No." like that person is some kind of authority.

You've lost me at the highlighted part.
I've read about Blender's supposedly horrible user interface A LOT. There's just so much bitching about it on the Internet. When Ton Roosendaal claimed that it was good that Blender's UI wasn't a separate layer, I called BS. I called BS, because he said that after practically admitting that we're stuck with Blender's UI for the time being.
In the past I messed around a bit with Blender a bit and ran into several supposedly problematic parts of its UI.
With that in mind, I was prepared to face a horrible learning process because I'll be damned before I spend 800€ on a 3ds license.

This time around I decided to spend some money upfront and get a book by a Blender developer and certified trainer instead of relying on tutorials and trying to lean it all by myself.
For more or less the last two weeks I've been using Blender for hours daily and despite all the hate and the hugely negative bias I had myself, I just cannot convince myself that Blender has a bad user interface.

NO, STOP!
Before you decide to log in just to tell me that the only reason I'm saying that is "because you haven't used <whatever you prefer> yet", read that again.
I did not say that 3ds, maya,... don't have better UIs - possibly even worlds better - just that Blender's "current" (I'm using 2.71) UI just isn't bad.

The worst thing I can say about it is that it's cluttered, but so is Visual Studio. Unlike in VS however, Blender allows you to change the appearance of its UI very easily. It's about as flexible as Lego bricks.

I have some gripes with it, but ultimately they're nothing when compared to one thing: The lack of standards in the world of 3d computer graphics.
Not only do you have the always popular question whether y or z should be up, but yesterday I also found out that the tangent bases seemingly aren't standardized either, when I wondered why my normal maps looked all wrong after creating them in xNormal.
This has already caused me more pain than the Blender UI.


But okay, I haven't used Blender for that long, so maybe there's parts I did not touch yet that manage to make my opinion go 180º.
Would you kindly point out some specific examples of Blender's UI that are - to put it in your terms - "cruel"? I'd like to see for myself instead of just repeating popular opinion.

It has nothing to do with open-/closed-source. "UI designed by programmer" is pretty much the worst way to insult an user interface. There's closed-source software that is just plain ugly (xNormal) and there's open-source software that is beautiful (Plasma 5 comes to mind).
The question is whether the UI was designed by actual designers and not whether its FOSS or not.

But granted, it's more common in the FOSS world.

 

Before this thread derails too much, here's my opinion of Unity in this regard.

Please note that I'm saying this as someone who has been using Unity mainly as a programmer, but has some experience in level design and also worked with Unity to this end. My opinion is limited to these two parts of game development.
There are many more areas that are part of a games development process I won't cover. Unity may or may not be great in them. I wouldn't know.


As far as programming goes, Unity is about as intuitive as it gets. You write some behavior, then you drag and drop it onto whatever gameobjects you want to have that behavior.
I love this component based model.
However, it does have its drawbacks. It makes it easier to write code fast, but harder to write fast code.
(I can share a specific experience I made with Unity, if anyone is interested.)


In an earlier post I said that Unity's scene view navigation was terrible. Here are some bullet points:

1. The general scene view navigation does not scale very well as far as speed goes. I modeled a flashlight and wanted to place it in the scene. It was a very exhausting experience because using right mouse + WASD just doesn't work for small items in a comfortable manner. You're simply moving way too fast.
Holding shift gives you the option to move even faster, so that's not helping a whole lot.
This is no border condition, since not everyone is creating huge outside scenes. People creating interior scenes would appreciate a way to move more slower.

Improvement idea: Give us a key that, when we hold it, makes us move slower.
Side-note: Why does "shift to go faster" even exist inside the editor? If you really want to move on the far side of your scene, you simply click on a random object close to your destination and hit F.

2. Following objects can be annoying. In order to follow an object automatically, you select it then press F twice while your mouse hovers the scene view editor. You'd be forgiven to think it did not work, because there are no visual indicators whatsoever.
Furthermore you cannot follow an object from a custom perspective. Since F is also the hotkey to center an object on your screen, the object you want to follow will always be centered. While you can zoom in and out, Unity stops following the object as soon as you move or rotate your camera. Unity doesn't tell you that it does that.

Improvement idea: Display a next to the gameobject's name in the hierarchy when following it and don't stop following when we adjust the perspective.

3. Following objects while editing them is implemented even worse. When you select an item, press F twice and then move it, at first it seems like Unity isn't following it. The object moves freely, the camera isn't following just yet and there is no indicator as I said earlier.
As soon as you let go to accept its new position, Unity will readjust the camera to center on the object again. That is unless you have moved your object too far, at which point it will just stop following it silently.

Improvement idea: Make following objects consistent by following it in real time as you edit in the scene view.

​

If this comes across as nit picking, that is because it is. Generally speaking, Unity is very designed very well. Those are just small issues, but I think I'm not the only one who would appreciate if they were to be taken seriously. As small as they are, they're annoying as hell.

 

Well, you can of course act however you want. But sometimes a no is simply a no. I don't need two pages to say that.

My backup is my own experience. And the myriads of new and even advanced users failing at Blender once, twice or even more times before they get traction (in case they don't quit in the first place), while being perfectly fine with most other 3D apps when they get a chance to use them. I see this still regularly happen.

This issue is called Usability. And that's a issue every developer should know about. A game developer even more. Usually a gamer is gone when he cannot find out how to use a game after 20 seconds.

That's the problem already. Reading does not help here. You have to use a UI to tell if it is good and does the job. I use Blender since several years now. I know its good sides and flaws in and out. You just started with it you said?

RMB select anybody? That's the most common and already the number one issue that makes newbies quit after five seconds.

Or have you noticed that a tool and settings can be virtually everywhere in Blender? Up, down, left right, in the properties, even in other windows like the Pack Islands settings of the UV Editing window that can be found in the sidebar of the 3D window. Very arbitrary placed. Where was space left ...

Please save me to name all the other trouble points in detail. Andrew Price, one of the Blender gurus, has made two videos with a long list of issues around the Blender UI before two years. Just curious, where have you been to miss that? Anyways. The named points are still all valid. And UI standards was one of them.

The very first UI design rule that you learn is: don't break UI standards when there is not a good reason to do so. Standards established usually for good reasons. You better don't try to make an ego shooter with some arbitrary keys like p,x,3 and numpad 4 instead of wasd for movement. And you better don't use rmb to select in a graphics software ...

Anyways, the Blender developers knows pretty well that there is need for improvement. The UI task force exists for good reason. The points to fix are all collected and written down already, including to make LMB as the standard select button. It's just that nothing happens.

It has a lot to do with Open Source. Because with a commercial app you have to care for the users. That's where the money comes from. While for a open source project you have to care to keep the programmers interested. Or they will stop submitting code, which is the end of the project at one point. That's two different directions with two different outcomes. It's of course also a question of available manpower, but usually in a open source project the programmers takes the job of UI design, in their very pragmatic way: there is space left, so let's place the button there ...

 

Tiles, Tiles is userfriendly.

The unfriendly part of Unity is mostly creating the art work. That's a Maya/3DS Max/Blender thing though...

 

Way to make yourself sound like a complete douchebag...

Do you expect anyone to take you seriously after:
"I have so much proof, I don't even need to show anybody. I'm just right, because I say so. Also, here's some anecdotal evidence."
?

Talking about reading, if you would have read my entire post and not just cherry-picked some sentences, you'd have understood that this was just what caused the negative bias towards Blender.
I actually used it.

Are you serious? Are you really serious?
Using right mouse to select is something you get used to withing an hour or two. And even if you don't want to, it's something you can change within no more than 20 seconds.
As dumb as I find it, if that's what makes you think Blender has a horrible UI, rest assured that it's a layer 8 problem.

No, I haven't.
But that's maybe just because I spent more than 5 minutes on trying to learn Blender and know the difference between the toolbox, properties-panel, properties-editor, outliner and menubar.
This will probably make your head explode, but this separation is both logical and consistent.

If you reread my previous post, you'll notice how I said that I disagreed with Mr. Roosendaal on how the UI shouldn't be an abstract layer.
You know when he said that? As a response to Andrew Price's UI concept. My main sticking point was that it was impossible to realize within Blender's current codebase.

Aside from RMB select which is unnecessary, Blender breaks some more UI standards. All of them for very good reason.
Blender doesn't use dialogs for example (and I cannot thank the developers enough for that). Standard: Click on create object. Dialog pops up. Set properties. Create object.
Blender: Create object. Change properties.
It's far superior on account of being faster and easier to use.

RMB for select is dumb, but not a big issue as I pointed out earlier. Again, if this made you stop: Improve layer 8.

Pfffft. Explain this then.

 

No, i'm intuitive!

Could you please stop your agressions? This is not the collosseum, and you are not a gladiator.

Where did i say that you have to rely at my word? I am just the messenger. I always back up my arguments with facts. I already gave you two examples as evidence, and pointed you to even more material.

And the Blender Devs knows about the flaws and wants to fix them. They are already working at it. And this includes issues like RMB select. You can find the UI targets listed at the Blender page.

So who is the douchebag here?

Have you even understood that this is just 1, in words ONE, of ALL the UI problems in Blender? And that ALL means more than three?

The RMB select issue is just the perfect example of a UI flaw. Because it is breaking a big UI standard for no reason.

Again, i will not list all the problems here. This thread is not a Blender UI thread. You asked for one example. I gave you two already! And you start to run amok. I have better things to do than to discuss UI basics with a newbie that still tries to defend even the biggest UI flaws.

Watch Andrew Price's videos when you want to know more, and you have a good fraction of the common UI problems in Blender covered. It's a pretty long list. I have pointed you to it for good reason. There is lots to learn.

That is exactly what i meant. A company has to care for the users. Or they have a big problem. Since that's where the money comes from. MS did an experiment with Windows 8. Didn't end too well really. And now look at Windows 10.

Microsoft has learned the lesson. Blender not. And you don't even understand the problem yet.

 

Referring to the thread that was closed the person who started it needs to give him/herself a break.

Learning is the easiest thing you can do and it happens very quickly. Understanding what you have learned though takes time and patience.

 

Blender's target audience are those who don't want to pay for a modeller. If you want a more user friendly and intuitive interface, you can pay for a better one. The cost is very steep though which is why so many indies are using Blender.

 

Agreed, I don't find modelling software in general intuitive or user friendly. Game engines to me are logical, the code is logical, the layout is logical and the common methodology in game development is again logical.

Some basic tasks in modelling tools need extensive knowledge and patience, in Z-brush trying to merge two meshes required major surgery and their scale tools need setting on fire. But got to hand it to them, sculpt tools are second to none, love their UV / Decimator / paint tools, again they're also better than the rest.

Blender, is a pain in the ass from start to finish. Powerful sure, convoluted very much so.. I actually preferred Blenders sculpting tools to Modo's by a long shot. But they all suck compared to Z-brush..

Although in some instances blender was none more convoluted than other 3D packages, like Maya LT for instance. Their selection tools are very selective about what they actually select (if you get my drift), the material and texturing setup is quite convoluted.. It seems to lack some basic box modelling utilities I've become accustomed to in Modo (Axis slice etc.)

BUT! I always use Maya or variants of for animation / rigging and smoothing groups.. You just can't beat it.

Modo, for me is like Unity.. Amazing at something's and half arsed in others. The documentation isn't exactly great, you really need to figure it out for yourself or use third party docs. I watched a four hour episode on someone rigging a foot, I can rig a complete character with Maya in a couple of hours. Smoothing groups etc. suck so go third party (Farfarer) for that sort of thing. For proper environment work with arch's / curvature etc. you'll really want mARCH, for texturing err.. You'll want substance or Quixel, even MARI if you have a boat load of cash.

But you cannot!! Beat Modo for box modelling, the tools are awesome, the cleanup system is great and it's quick even if the navigation tools are a bit clonky.

I've never come across a modelling tool that I've thought, yeah!! This is nice and simple. Personally I like 3DSMax, but it's too expensive.

 

Blender being a hassle navigating with menus was a help really because it forced me to watch tutorials and they invariably use shortcuts and there happens to be a very nice shortcut png template for Blender 2.5 & above with a search in a search engine.

I also like the new UI tabs they are adding to Blender.

I have tried demos of the 2 paid products but there is not the keyboard shortcut png template or number of good free tutorials that the Blender community has made.

Blender is definitely best unless you plan on paying to go to a 3D modeling vocational school and learn one of those paid tools and be employed by a business other than your own attempts to create your own games. Face it, most of the paid 3d modeling tools advanced features that make it easier to model with them are not transferable when you try to export out to a game in FBX format anyway.

 

What does that mean?

 

I'm not mixing anything up. I've been in software and UI design for 25 years. My definition was a joke, everything following that is reality. Something cannot be intuitive and unfriendly, or unintuitive and user friendly. Its not possible. If something is user friendly, then it is intuitive by definition and vice versa. Blender is both unintuitive and user unfriendly, so is powershell or the linux command prompt. All of those things are powerful, but you must put a lot of time and effort into learning them. Just because there is a segment of the population that has put the time in and can do great things does not mean that it is user friendly or intuitive.

 

INFJ here.. not that it matters, lol

 

Rather straightforward statement. It's what Maya LT acknowledges in it's feature set.

 

This is a very acurate summarization of Modo for me. Especially figuring things out for yourself.
As every year I have high hopes for the new release - that The Foundry finally adresses all those small things.

Actually I don't find Unity's documentation as bad as some people make it out to be. Maybe the writing just resonates with me. Modo on the other hand has a really counterintuitive documentation for me. Often times when I want to access it from within the program with F1 - Click it leads to the main page or a different topic I was not interested in. And somehow I don't like the wording "users can..." which they are using all the time. It stops my reading flow more often than I want to admit. Also Modo's flexibility - the point The Foundry pride themselves with - is super unintuitive for me. Creating shortcuts, layouts and menues should be a visual process. It is not. Not at all. It's menues and lists over menues and lists. And I find it very abstract. Cinema4D or ZBrush do it like it's supposed to be for me: create emties and use drag and drop. Though even for ZBrush you need to at least know a few shortcuts before it works.

Those are problems I've so far didn't have with Unity. Maybe it's because I've eased in from version 2.x where Features weren't as many as they are now.

When it comes to being intuitive I am really a fan of making complex things easy to access.
Regarding this I am absolutely in love with this video since it was posted in the "visual scripting" thread:

(edit) since I've focused on negatives again I want to emphasize that I do like and use modo as my main 3D app for a few years now. It's just that the things that don't work are sometimes really frustrating to me.

 

Not really, if UV mapping tools / animation and rigging tools / vertex maps etc. / NURBS and Box modelling tools saves you time it's quicker regardless of how you export it. I won't generally bother spending a lot of time setting up shader trees etc., because chances are you're going to tweak the crap out of it in the engine, especially in UE.

As for Export in Maya LT, well there's an export to UE4 and Unity setting. So it's been all good in the hood for me, I like Maya LT even if I generally do most of my modelling in Modo.

@the_motionblur

I agree, I've never found Unity's documentation hard to follow.. Until you start getting into more complicated matters (rendering pipeline) then it becomes a bit of a guessing game as to what you're allowed to do.

Modo's documentation quite frankly doesn't help, at all.! It's either out of date, or it really assumes you know how to get through the masses of sub-menus to actually start following what they're telling you. It's really not N00B friendly, like I needed to export a colour map for Quixel, without the game guide someone had graciously published I'd of struggled.

Once you understand it, it's pretty simple. But the issue is getting to the point where you understand it ..

 

Actually, that's a really nice way of putting it.
As I said earlier, Blender might not have the best UI, but it's certainly not as bad as some make it out to be. I don't find it to be bad at all, tbh.
However, this doesn't mean that, say 3ds max, doesn't have a better UI.

I disagree and pointed out why exactly I do so.
The more powerful and specialized a tool gets, the less intuitive it will be because the sheer amount of features and the fact that it's highly specialized, will make it harder and harder to understand unless you put in a considerable amount of work beforehand.
By your definition it would be impossible to write an user friendly tool, targeted at professionals.

No, I disagree on that one too.
If this exact segment of the population was the desired target audience of the developers to begin with, I consider it to be user friendly as long as said users are happy with it's workflow/usage.

 

Not sure why this matters, I find Blender to be a pain in the ass. Others love it, I like Bovril and some others don't.. It's what gets you from A to B and you're arguing opinion which you'd probably have better luck with a wall.

I wouldn't say the more powerful a tool is, the less intuitive it becomes. Unity itself is a powerful tool, with a metric ton of options and never once have I thought it difficult to use. You can tell they put the time in to streamline workflow, I could make an engine that's pretty basic, but I can guarantee 95% of people won't know how to use it.

 

I hated Blender, but when you get the concept and have good manuals, it is not so bad. What I find terrible is, too many noobs posting tutorials on youtube. This is the big timesink. But I would also not describe Blender as userfriendly, it has a very steep learning curve. Once you are over the crest, it begins to be much easier though. The problem is that they do not follow any standards of shortcuts. Also gimp has a weird userinterface. But being the only free alternatives, Blender and Gimp are worth learning.

But yes, i would not all them userfriendly, for doing one main mistake, not following any standards of any other interface.

 

Yes, but I don't know about you, but when I first touched Unity I a) already knew how to program and b) took my sweet time to learn before I even attempted to do anything more complex than Pong.

If I would have just jumped straight into the editor, I would have probably spend more time on the forums asking how to do trivial stuff. You know? Just like probably half the forum users. Especially the scripting board is filled with people that either never programmed, never thought about checking out the official tutorials or never heard about the documentation.
And I'm not even talking about people who post things along the lines of:
"I want this feature from game X. Give me code plox!!11!"


As far as Blender goes, many people who cry about how hard Blender is to use. However, many people try to learn how to use Blender on their own, only using online tutorials.

Learning by yourself is far from ideal. That's just how it is. Ideally you'd attend to a course run by a professional. The most obvious reason is that you'd have someone competent you could ask, if something is unclear. The second problem is that online tutorials are at best only as good as the person who made them. Every programmer knows that, depending on the circumstances, you either assume the worst or the average case, but never, ever assume that the best case will happen. Doing so will bite you in the ass really hard in future.

It's a simple fact that being good at something doesn't equal being good at explaining something. Not everyone is a born teacher.

As @Kiskara pointed out, the average video tutorials you'll find on Blender are bad. I agree, because I fell for them in my first attempts to learn Blender myself. And that doesn't necessarily mean that those people are noobs. Maybe they're really, really skilled, just not good at communicating their knowledge.

I consider my current attempt at learning Blender to be very successful. Instead of going with YouTube videos and hope for the best, I paid 50 bucks for a book written by a Blender Developer and Blender Foundation Certified Trainer. I hoped that someone who is an officially certified trainer, would not only be skilled, but also hold up to a certain standard as to how good he is to bring his knowledge across.
I was not disappointed.

Tell me, how many YouTube tutorials spend an entire chapter (or video, if you wish) just talking about Blender's UI Elements. Not the UI itself, just the elements.
"This is a list/dropdown-list/radio-button/input field/... This is how you know them from your OS. And this is how they work in Blender."

I think this is probably one of the biggest failings of YT tutorials: They assume that you already know a lot of things and just gloss over the details. Competent teachers don't do that.

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What I meant when I said that I think that more complex programs are less intuitive, is that if you keep adding features, your program will become harder to learn due to the sheer amount of features new users would have to wrap their heads around first.
Ideally, you'd use buttons with icons and texts. They're about as self-explanatory as it gets. However, that's not an option if you really need a lot of them. Those features must go somewhere after all.
What do you do once you run out of space, trying to keep the UI as clean and intuitive and simple as possible? Do you hide those features in sub-sub-sub-menus? The newbie will probably appreciate that move. The professional who needs these features a hundred times a day not so much.

I just don't think you can make UIs universally user-friendly, because different people have different needs/preferences.

 

Thing is, if you have to go on a course to learn it then that's the epitome of un-intuitive. Saying that is admission that it's not an easy to use intuitive program you can use by yourself, if you really must go on a course use 3DSMax and Maya at least it's a solid career choice. I never needed courses for 3DSMax or Modo..

You don't need a course to lean Unity (you can of course) but if you have any clue about games then it's pretty self explanatory. I've been modelling 10 years and Blender still didn't sit well.. But one of the artists in another team shuns both Maya and Modo for it because he's used to it..

Although I'll agree, most of the issues aren't down to how difficult blender is but the tutorials that are available and it's not lack of quality, it's a two part issue. They constantly update Blender in which a lot of them become invalidated, UE4 has some of the same issues too so I'm not just pointing fingers here.

I'll half agree with the UI thing, again UE4 has become a little fat and convoluted with hidden menu's all over the place. Because of the amount of options.. But it's still not as bad as some 3D modelling software, not by a long shot...

 

Or you can type space and type the name of the operation you're trying to do (which will begin populating an autocomplete). If you're in the correct editing mode to perform the operation, it will be in the autocomplete list.

I think knowing what I'm doing after learning a few tutorials & typing the names of things is worth my $0 more than zbrush for slightly less time in tutorials is worth my $400 to $700.

It's also got that epic name.

@Kiskara you can setup your own shortcuts in blender to make them more standard