Why is open source software so badly designed?

> A designer can’t just spend a few hours and do a meaningful contribution to badly designed UI design. But a developer can identify a bug, fix it and do a pull request even within minutes.

And herein lies the fallacy.

No, good (UX) design is not at all more complex than writing software itself.

What software developers have (mostly) figured out is a way to do small, piecemal improvements to their software that iteratively take it to a desired future goal. There is a ton of material on iterative development, agile development and continuous delivery.

But designers keep living in this parallel reality where they can't think of small, iterative changes that help you get to an improved solution step-by-step.

I've been in a number of organizations with great designers, but it was rare I could get them to think about iterative design: design a first step towards a greater vision that is an improvement, but not the final solution.

Part of that is tooling. While things like Figma allow you to make your own workflow on an infinite whiteboard, they don't have any support for quickly designing in-between design/development steps.

But bigger part is thinking: the art of software development is a bit further down the line than the art of software UX design, and free software developers don't have the time to deal with designers unwilling to accept the reality of them having only small chunks of time to work on their pet projects.

This post is also discussed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33741032#33746369.