From BlenderWiki

New User Experience Is Important

Blender has many cool features, but is lacking in accessibility to new users. It can seem impenetrable, overly complicated at times, or suffer from information overload.

It is my opinion that with a bit of work on Blender's user interface with an eye towards new user adoption, Blender can become easier to use for new users as well as existing users. This has advantages for everybody since new users means more developers and more developers means more cool features.

I think that if we were to work on Blender's new user experience, it could become one of the leading 3D software packages.

The New User

New users are concerned about two things.

1. How do I control the camera?
2. How do I edit the mesh in the most basic way?

That's it. They don't yet care about animation, rendering, properties, cameras, materials, anything. All they care about is learning how to make an object worth animating, rendering, etc. Look at some Blender tutorials for example, the first thing they go over is camera controls, the second thing is basic mesh editing. If you make these first steps confusing or difficult then they will abandon Blender as junk.

Blender's New User Experience

Here are the steps a new user must go through to start editing a mesh. (Note: Yes all of this information is available through tutorials, but people don't like watching tutorials, especially if they're already familiar with other tools. Everything needed to operate Blender at its most basic level should be learnable through Blender itself.)

1. Change to edit mode. A new user doesn't know that this is necessary to edit a mesh. A new user doesn't know that the mesh can't be edited in object mode. The new user must look it up. It's not in a menu. It's in a dropdown labeled "Object Mode" - the user may not know what that means, or that it's a dropdown, or that clicking it allows mode changes. "Edit Mode" in that dropdown isn't visible until the user has clicked the dropdown.
2. Choose an edit type. The new user doesn't know how to do this. There are three buttons on the button bar that do this but they are buried in other crap and not obvious. This is also not available in a menu.
3. Select something in the mesh to edit. This is a problem since the user will try to left click and select is right click. It may not even occur to some people to try right click. It's really damn frustrating not to be able to select things.
4. Choose whether to Grab, Rotate, Scale. The user does not know these shortcut keys exist. The buttons on the toolbar that provide Maya style manipulators are not obvious, and not the recommended way of operating Blender.

By now many people have quit. Even if they persevere, Blender has many other similar interface problems.

My Target New User Experience

Here's what I would like to see:

1. Change to edit mode. There is a larger button on screen that does this directly from Object mode. In fact, there should be four, one for Vertex, Edge, and Face, and one to return to Object. They are by default present until specifically hidden by the user.
2. Select something to edit. Using left click like everything else does. Nobody cares that right click is superior - they already closed Blender because how the hell do you select things? Really I have no idea how right click select has persisted this long.
3. Choose whether to Grab, Rotate, Scale. Just like edit modes, there are buttons on the screen that do this. They can be hidden later of course, for when the user learns the advanced keystrokes.

Splash Screen

The splash screen currently has:

• A setter for interaction modes
• Links to the manual and other important websites

The splash screen needs:

• An option to make it disappear forever (unless opened manually)
• An option to recall a custom user interaction mode
• A link to a short in-program tutorial which covers the basics of navigation.

Default Screen

Part of Blender's strength is its infinitely configurable interface. But to new users, this feature is only overwhelming. Some tutorials spend a lot of time introducing all of these windows and then cap it off with, "But you won't need this for now, we'll cover this more in tutorial 5." The new user who has just opened Blender for the first time doesn't need to configure the windows, they only need to learn the basics of modeling. They don't need a timeline or an outliner or a properties panel. I would like to see new users presented with a simpler default screen:

So like this:

http://i.imgur.com/ErmDd.png

Simple. Clean. A great first impression. William Raynish also did a fantastic mockup:

http://goo.gl/xUsfW

This should not affect existing users who already have their projects set up the way they like.

The default screen should also have an obvious render button, and a default project set up that looks good and doesn't take too long to render. Perhaps the monkey. The cube could work.

Controls

Here are my recommendations for Blender's user interface. Ideally I would love to see Blender shipped with a "Beginner Mode" or an "Old Dinosaur Mode" that has this, for users like me who just aren't as avaunt-garde as Blender is.

1. Make left click selection. Most users expect this. A lot of current users love right click selection and that's fine. I understand that RMB is more ergonomic and intuitive and so on, but every single other program ever uses left click to select and Blender only confuses people when it insists on right click.
2. Get rid of the 3D cursor. Its main use is to set the local origin for transformations, but I feel that from a design perspective there are many better ways of doing this. It's a crass way of doing something that could be much more elegant. One of my future projects is to implement better ways of doing what the 3D cursor does.
3. Keep the current camera controls. Middle click to rotate and scroll wheel to dolly is just fine. Yes, Maya does it differently, but Blender doesn't need to do it that way. When Blender used the trackball camera rotation it was horrible. I know it's better for some use cases but for most people it just confuses.
4. Get rid of Object/Mesh Mode. A dumb old dinosaur like me always forgets which mode he is in and hits ctrl-tab whilst in object mode. You know you've done it too. What makes it worse is that many key bindings do different things in each mode. (Note: The same people who quote Raskin and champion Blender's RMB for usability reasons seem to be blind to the fact that Blender makes this usability faux pas.)

Usability Mindset

Blender is a powerful tool and I feel like it deserves to have more success and wider usage than it has now. But I also feel that the user interface of Blender is holding it back. It could have much higher adoption, but it takes an adamant stance that it caters to power users, and makes few attempts to help new or "casual" users. I've read a lot of the forum posts and mailing lists and the attitude seems to be "Powerful tools are hard to use," without much attempt at user experience, especially new user experience. But I disagree with this stance for two reasons:

• I believe that powerful tools and ease of use/learning are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and
• I think that Blender can be made easier to learn and use without sacrificing the current paradigm or making drastic changes to the user interface.

I've also heard, "Make the software usable by idiots and only idiots will use the software." I want to make a distinction between "new users" versus "idiots." New users are not idiots, they are smart and skilled people who we want to use Blender. Even smart new users need to start with a simple interface. But if Blender is too complicated then they will not adopt it, and we would be turning smart, skilled people away from Blender.

Existing Users

Existing users should not be affected by usability work. Any work that is done to help new users adopt Blender should not affect the workflow of current users.

That said, if you are an existing user of Blender and you disagree with any change designed to help new users, then that's okay. These changes are not designed for you. You can continue to use Blender the way you are used to. New users will use a different profile and you will not be affected.