Ergonomics: the good one and the complete disaster

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Today, I will show you two technologies. Where one design solution turned out as complete disaster and another where it made the technology more comfortable and usable.


    GIMP

GIMP logo (Image source)

GIMP is a free open-source image manipulation program, which allows you to work with raster-graphics images and modify them.

The overall design of this program makes harder to find the right tool for you. To get used to it you must first look for some guides on the Internet and spend around a week to understand where everything you needed is located. Also, some of the design choices made there looks outdated compared to modern programs.

Another big problem with design is that some of the sub windows inside it could be easily closed by a miss-click. However, then you try to reopen them, you find yourself on the spot where you don't have even any clue on how to do it.

Because of those problems, many users are abandoning this program in favor of the enterprise ones (Like Adobe Photoshop), this shows that its ergonomics is what makes this program clumsy and hard to use, because the substitution program doesn't share these bad traits.


    Discord

Discord logo (Image source)

Discord is a popular communication platform for sharing information between users. It is similar to other programs such as Slack, Mattermost, etc. However, those programs are more aimed at corporation, while Discord is more like social media platform.

By itself, Discord provides, high customization, while not forcing the user to customize it at all to get the great experience from it.

Discord also has simplistic design, for both mobile and desktop, which looks sleek and feels intuitive at the same time. Every communication channel that you create have rich configuration. In case you don't like the order of your contacts you could simply drag the icons to order it in your favor of even categorize it. So, everything feels there, like it should be.

Overall, I can say that the design of this platform clearly helped it became highly popular.


Conclusion

Those were two examples of what design could do to its product popularity. So, in the end, the design is as important as the overall functionality of the product, because in case your product looks and feels bad, nobody will use it even if it has great potential.



References

    GIMP

    Discord

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