One thing to be noted about digital artists (Painters in particular) is that they absolutely hate when there is too much of the UI covering their screen. They also tend to dislike having an abundance of tools and options they never use cluttering up that same UI. This of course doesn't just affect artists, it's basics of UI design. Sorry for how long this got, but that's just an indicator of the amount of effort I put into this.

Screenshot

That is the default UI of Krita 2.8 it is outdated considering the featureset (Overview menu is incredibly important, and it's not on by default :O ) but let me point out what is wrong with this UI.

Issues pointed towards

Pointing out the issues

1: The status bar is absolutely pointless, all this information could be presented elsewhere, I don't need to know my working color profile or precise resolution while I work, and while it is good to know the overall page zoom percentage, we certainly do not need a whole horizontal bar for it! (It would work out just fine in the upper right corner or as a part of the layer docker instead)

Allow me also to note here that disabling the status bar does not stick as a setting and it will be shown again next time the program is launched. Same with the "file" toolbar.

2: When brushes can already be picked from a drop down menu, if that menu's button (4 icons to the left of 6) is made obvious at first launch, there is absolutely no use in this docker and it is generally a good idea for artists to remove this to avoid clutter. This docker is just taking up space that could have been better used.

3: This is way too much area for something as simple as tool options, add shape shouldn't be in there at all (you should hide it like your life depends on it, it is the worst feature in the whole program! never have I seen vectors handled this badly elsewhere) this happened because you crammed the reference image docker in there, which was a pretty bad idea, that thing should not be enabled by default either, it should be toggled, artists don't need to have a reference all the time, and this space is too small for most references to begin with! so it is redundant to have it this big

4: the top bar feels like it is too high, I will explain this in a bit.

5: There's something missing here (Flow)

6: These icons are absolutely not needed nor useful, and to prove my point, neither corel nor photoshop have this ****!

7: The tools bar is too wide and has several redundant tools or tools that should really be located in a right-click context menu (which we do not actually have)

Luckily much of this can be fixed with existing customization options, first, let me show what I do with the UI.

Adjusted Default UI

So then, 7's width problem was fixed, 6's icons were removed, 5's flow slider was added to the top bar. 3's reference window was removed and tool options substituted to the color picker (not really the best solution, but it works), 2's redundant brush preset picker was removed, 1's status bar was removed.

Already feels much better, and more professional. Overview was added and undo history substituted to it. Nothing but the barebones needed painter tools are in there (and just to note, this is not my usual setup, I usually have the UI important bits on the left side and the tools on the right side, because it is easier for me to work on the left side of the tablet)

Also notice that I added the "show grid" button to a comfortable place, and I added "Mirror Layer Horizontally/Vertically" next to the mirror modes, sadly I would have wanted to use the real "Mirror View" function which is MUCH faster than these functions are, but that one can only mirror the view vertically

And this stuff was just what I could come up with within the constraints already placed on user customization (which are very low compared to almost all other programs ever made! Kudos! But there are still some configuration issues (like badly organized keyboard shortcut configuration, no ability to configure what modifier keys or mouse keys do when pressed, etc) you're on the right track)

As an off topic side note, other programs tend to use the overview thing as a "navigator" it would be nice to have that implemented (basically it shows with a box how zoomed in you are on what part of the image, and you can click on it to move your screen to another part of the image you would like to work on, it's incredibly useful on a large canvas if you are zoomed very far in, then you don't have to zoom out first)

So, let me cover in depth my thought-of solutions to the UI problems I named besides the ones I already solved up there.

1: While the status bar is pointless, the zoom feature that can only be implemented as a part of it definitely is not. The status bar should be disabled by default, but it's zoom feature should be placed elsewhere, like on the top right of the screen (on the top bar, aligned to the right) or as an extra part of the layers docker or the overview docker. I think it would make most sense in that corner though.

2: The brush preset button on the top bar could be made more visible by actually making it look like a brush (this idea should also be applied to the "Paint with brushes" tool since it makes no sense for it to be an "S", and people may start wondering "where is the brush tool?") people will figure out to click it once they start looking for it, and if I remember correctly, photoshop also does this.

3: Add shape should not have a docker of it's own, it should only exist in the form of tools. The reference image docker should be accessible and obviously exist, but it is not needed in the UI all the time, it should be something that is toggled (preferably with a button or a keybind), the tool options menu is a bit of a trickier one though, other programs solve this by using the top bar in context with the tool that is in use, so if the brush tool is selected it's options show up on the top bar. That approach makes a lot of sense (why would I need brush size, or flow, or gradient or whatever when I am working with the selection tools?), but I think there could be a potentially better solution out there, because I really like that customizable top bar.

My idealistic solution for it is either having it as a pop-up menu that only activates on keybind, or as a drop-down menu that is by default installed somewhere on the top bar. There is also the highly redundant "Tools" context menu on the toolbar which has almost nothing in it and could contain things like the reference window and tool options. Luckily however most people don't mess too much with these tool options to begin with so they're not that big of a problem, but they definitely are needed and should be accessible, but you don't need access to them the whole time you draw, which is why I think substituting them to the color picker is a pretty decent solution, at least temporarily.

4: The topbar feels like it's huge, but it's really not much bigger than in photoshop, maybe it's bigger by 2 or 3 pixels or something, a solution to this would be making it scaleable both in the sense that you could make it smaller/bigger vertically, and you could scale down and scale up the size of the individual icons on it. What is making it appear huge is not it's true size, but the size of the icons on it, the size and opacity sliders are too "obvious" somehow too thick, and so is the text next to them, they also don't need to have this down-arrow next to them if the flow solider is also added in like I did. The text is too much, the text could be located inside the sliders for these things (or if the sliders are made smaller, above the sliders) if you would like to follow photoshop's example the sliders could be made into drop-downs so that they are hidden when not in use. But in any case, I think it would be a good idea to put some effort into minimizing this top bar a little, shrink the font size, shrink the sliders and also shrink the icons, then see if you can't reduce the vertical size of the bar. Options are a key here, so still offering options to scale it back up or even scaling it further down would be wise.

5: Flow is just as important as opacity and size! It should be configurable by default and not obscured You guys are probably the only ones that actually hide it!

6: Not even gimp has this "Save/Open/New" ****! where did you get this terrible idea? This is not an office program which are probably the only programs I have ever seen with such outrageously redundant buttons (when everybody goes to the file context menu anyways to do all this stuff)

7: Well apart from being able to shrink the bar from the start, I think a little bit of effort could be made to reorganize this bar and re-evaluate some of the tools in it. If you look at photoshop's UI you will find that their tools are organized via separators depending on their functionality. They at the top have "Selection" tools. Beneath it they have editing and painting tools, further beneath that they have vector tools (like text, add shapes which for them is a drop down menu it would seem) and finally beneath that they have "utility".

While Krita? which actually has less tools (photoshop just hides different versions of the same tool in context menus for almost all their tools which can be seen through right clicking which is how they can fit so many tools in less space than Krita does) is taking up more space while having less space per tool, so little space in fact that it is hard to see what tool is what by just looking at the icon. And your tools are a total mess, there is almost no order, there are no separators, they're just lined up in a way that somehow seems to maybe make sense for someone. And it's not actually that terrible of a lineup.

But there are too many icons for too little functionality. Lets first look at redundancy.

The Line Tool... it is so simple, that it doesn't need to be a tool, it can be a keypress, like how you hold shift to increase brush size, hold alt or something to draw a straight line.

Draw Polyline, is essentially the same thing but you can draw more than one lines at once. This could still be just a keybind (or at least they could be combined into one tool)

Draw a Polygon is the exact same thing as polyline except the first and last line are automatically connected (very very redundant)

Draw a path, here things get a bit more interesting. This could still work out as a keybind (and with this you would be surpassing most programs in convenience, if you can draw a complicated path of bezier curves and straight lines by just holding down a button, not worrying about a specific tool, oh man that is a good idea)

All these above tools work exactly the same way, but have a bit of added functionality the lower you go down the list, it is absolutely redundant to keep these tools separate so either turn the path tool into a keybind (my suggestion is still the unused ALT) or remove the redundant line and polyline tools.

Draw Rectangle/Ellipse are nice, they are essentially add shape done right. It would be cool to make them into one tool called "Draw Shape" which right clicking on would give a context menu to change what shape to draw, but since there's only two of them there is not really a need (however if something more is added, like a hexagon, diamond or some such then this would be a needed change)

Draw a freehand path is probably the most useless thing you have in your program. It is a specific tool to draw without pressure sensitivity when you could just create a button on the top menu that allows users to toggle/force on/off opacity sensitivity and size sensitivity for their selected brush (overriding their default settings) I know some other programs have a button like this and it is very useful to be able to switch pressure sensitivity on or off or to enable specific type of sensitivity that is off by default for your brush. But this tool, draw freehand path? it is completely redundant since brushes can already be configured to have no sensitivity without too much difficulty. Instead of this tool it would be best to have a better way to toggle sensitivity.

Paint with Dynamic Movements is absolutely crazy, I can't imagine anyone actually using it, it's a tool that deliberately messes up your lines, this does not need to be a tool, this can be a mode for the brush tool (like the mirror modes) in case anyone would actually want to use this to goof off.

Draw with multibrush should be a brush mode like mirror mode, not a specific tool.

Measure The Distance Between Two Points seems completely redundant, it's a straight line, I could do the same thing with the line tool essentially, but it does measure degrees of tilt which is going to do much more than this straight line ever would.

Ruler assistant editor tool is not a ruler, It is something entirely different from a ruler, I do not know what this is, I just know that it is not a ruler since it is neither straight nor has any form of measurement on it and has no resemblence whatsoever to a ruler, this tool seems completely useless to me again but I don't know if there is anyone who actually uses it so I can't really say if it should be removed, maybe someone finds it useful, but I doubt it very much.

Edit The Grid While the perspective grid is an awesome tool, edit the grid shouldn't be a tool! why on earth would I want to move the pixel grid? What does that achieve? the "show grid" button which I added to the top menu before does everything that I need; toggles the grid (it even automatically switches over to this tool, which is more than what I need since i will have to switch back to the brush tool)

Select polygonal area and select by path are redundant, only the latter is really needed as it does everything the first one does, but is capable of more.

Shape Handling should not be a specific tool, instead the transform tool should be used for transforming shapes, also I doubt anyone uses krita to use it's terribly bad vectors, so I think it's a bit weird for it to be at the top of the tool chain.

Finally, lets cover the order in which the tools should be sorted. I think they should be ordered by importance and importance should be determined by the target userbase which I think is digital painters. If so

Brush Tool should come first. The shape tools (that is draw ellipse/rectangle) should come next, after this the path tool (the one and only!) and then a separator should be placed. Next should come the paint-bucket, gradient, color picker, separator, move tool, transform tool, crop tool, select freehand, rectangle, ellipse, path, brush, magic wand, simlar colors, separator, Text tool, Edit Perspective Grid

And if measure the distance between two points and the ruler serve any purpose they should come out on the bottom next to the perspective grid as well.

Furthermore, allowing users to customize the tool order (if this isn't possible already would be a great idea).

That is my input for a more intuitive and professional as well as comfortable out-of-the-box user interface. To be honest you're not far off, and it's not as much work as it may seem judging by how big this wall of text was, but I feel that these aesthetic, look and feel changs would be very beneficial to the programs immediate success before the eyes of newcomers. (Make the user interface intuitive enough so that a new user doesn't really need to customize it right out of the box, and of course so that a new user knows where everything is on his first glance at the program)

I hope some of my advice will be heard or at least seriously discussed, first impressions are very important, and your default user interface setup is essentially that same first impression, naturally even if there are many presets installed with the program, the default is the most important one because it's the first one users see, and it needs to be one that can be used and makes use of all the most important features while not cluttering itself up with unnecessary/optional stuff.

@cestarian

Wow, you really spent a lot of time looking this over.

You have some good points in here. There is a lot of text. Realize that unless you are going to try to do everything you list in your critique, there isn't an army of developers that are working on this. If there was, the issues you mention would have been fixed long ago.

The best way to communicate changes is really focus on one thing at a time. What bothers you the most? I would follow this format for UI changes:

What is the issue?: The New/Open/Save icons in the toolbar are redundant and cluttering up the UI
What is the solution?: Remove them.
Why is this better?: These features already exist in the menu right above. They add little value and clutter the UI.

That is the type of reasoning that I like to see. It doesn't have to be written in that format, but having those points is important. This gives a good base to improve things. UI isn't art. It is functionally based, so it really helps if there are reasons that you have a stance and have logic behind your proposed solution.

Again, I would just focus on one thing at a time and go from there. I know it can be difficult because your mind is racing with all of these things that would make Krita better. We all have that urge, but know things can't move that fast. We can only focus on one thing at a time.

Anyway, the point about New/Open/Save I think is a good one that you brought up. I think we can remove those toolbar icons.

1) The status bar is great, it allows people to have an instand oversight of the situation. Everytime someone comes to the devs with problems, we can see in an eye-blink of the screenshot what kind of image they are working on.

2) The brush docker is great, it prevents newbies from asking 'where are the brush tools?'

3) QT just orders it that way. It makes sense on small screens because then the tool-options aren't obscured automatically.

4) If you right-click on the topbar you can configure whether you want text or not. Further customisation of the UI won't be sensible to put in until QT has a good basis for it.

5) You can add this with 'configure toolbar', two is the default because the vast majority of computer users use a smaller screen.

6) Is because Krita is part of the Calligra suite.

7) There's no redundant icons. People actually use all of these tools, except for the grid tool, but that's because the grid tool is broken.

The line tool- Needs to be a seperate tool, because it has seperate tool options. It can be accessed with 'v' now in master.

Draw a path is a vector tool. It has again, widely different tool-options. Furthermore, photoshop, gimp, etc, all have this tool seperately.

Draw a freehand path, is again, a tool with different options from the freehand tool, as well as widely different features.

Multibrush tool, a different tool under the hood. It's not a mirror mode, because mirror can handle selections, this can't.

Dynamic Brush, this is used in the creation of chaos, which is a concept art method.

Measure tool. People use this. Technical illustrators, mostly. I am surprised you have never seen it before.

Assistant tool. Again, I am surprised you never checked the 'assistant' button in the freehand tool. It's a pretty big feature of Krita, and yes, people use this.

shape-selection tool. This is kinda pointless to discuss, because the vector tools are going to receive a full overhaul after 3.0.

Things I didn't mention I have no opinion about.
I wish however you'd be a bit more considerate of other people using Krita when critiquing the UI. I too feel the UI can be cluttered, but many things are in flux, so you don't know where it's going to end up. Furthermore, a lot of the things mentioned make it much easier for newbies to get used to Krita.
In this manner, it also does help, as Scott said, to subdivide problems. Now we just have lists and lists, and those aren't a nice read.

For point 6, I am going to try to propose to remove those icons (even if for the entire Calligra suite). That idiom of having those icons in the toolbar is a fairly old UI practice. Most modern UIs don't use that. It was more popular 15-20 years ago when consumers were first getting started with computers. That is also why you have really old metaphors like 1.44 inch floppy disks as an icon for save. I don't think most people under 20 are going to know what that even is. I think having the file menu as well as the shortcuts will be sufficient. the toolbar was originally created to make frequently used operations more accessible. Operations such as New and Open are more single use.

Are there any use cases where it is important that New/Open/Save is on the toolbar? I think other tools could be better utilized there.

@TheraHedwig
January 2014 browser statistics say (Only ones I could find) that 47% of internet users have 1920x1080 or higher display resolution, 34% users have a higher browser resolution than 1920x1080 which is the majority. only 31% have 1366x768, and all numbers below that are less than 10% of users per resolution. (but if all of these numbers are added together we have 53% from 1366x768 and below. This is probably a result of tablets and mobile phones however)

I'm sure the high number of 1366x768 displays is probably because there are many TVs sold in that resolution, and older laptops are as well in that resolution range. That most users have small display resolutions is very outdated information (like 2008 level of outdated;6 years out of date! unless you would include mobile phone resolutions.)

The split seems to be mostly 50/50 between low resolution and high resolution.

Furthermore, having a good monitor is actually important for digital artists, meaning that there is an even higher chance of people who use krita have 1920x1080 or higher resolution than for your average internet junkie.

I've seen common tablets with a higher resolution than 1920x1080 (samsung galaxy note 12 for one, and that is a viable tablet for digital art too), but one thing is for sure, most monitors are either in the 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio, and outdated monitors which you can expect to see very little of are going to be 4:3. Anything else would be a multi-monitor setup normally. With that aside as a justification for my improvements to the basic setup and clutter.

1: Yes, the status bar is great, but it contains nothing but information that could easily be contained elsewhere where it wouldn't have to be "clutter". It's no justification that it allows people who are giving help to see this data from screenshots; in fact wouldn't it be better if all related information would be located somewhere in the "help" submenu? and then it could be more easily requested from people asking for help? Hell there could even be more detailed information if it were done this way. Better for troubleshooting.

2: I have never actually seen another program place it there. Corel doesn't, Photoshop doesn't, not even MyPaint which is known for it's ease of use does it! If you make the button that is used to open the brush picker menu shiny and obvious enough, people will find it once they start looking for it. If they could do it in all these other programs, they can do it in krita as well, Krita after all has this button in roughly the same place as all these other programs do to begin with. It's only problem is that it's not well labeled (icon is not very descriptive). I can immediately think of a fix for this; and everyone else is doing it too! don't use a icon with pictures of boxes to indicate where the brush picker is. Use the icon of the currently selected brush instead. Problem immediately solved!

Sure you can argue that Gimp does it, but Gimp has never been known for clever and intuitive UI Design (quite the opposite, it isk nown for having an even steeper learning curve than photoshop! and a dislikeable, hideous, ugly UI) people are just a little bit smarter than we give them credit for. Just a tiny bit.

3: Yes, it is not the behavior of Qt I'm really bothered by (that if a docker subordinated to your selected one is too big, then the docker's minimum size should increase, this makes sense), this specific area was a good thing to point towards to prove a point about inefficient UI design out of the box, and redundant dockers that are not needed. (Like add shape, and reference which you normally don't use that much, and if you were to use it you would normally want it in a much bigger area than that anyways!)

4: You can only to a limited extent control the text. I can not hide "Mode:" I can not hide "Opacity:" nor "Size:" nor "Flow:" And I also noticed that the icons can be scaled in here, but the smallest scale is not small enough (there should be 14px, 12px and possibly even 8px)

5: Yup, and I did, in my later example, I was just pointing this out.

6: Krita has vastly outgrown the calligra suite to an extent that it just isn't right to subordinate it to the calligra suite. And besides, this **** is the only indication that Krita was ever meant to be a part of an office suite which nobody uses. But since the programmers were probably used to designing their UI after other office suites, this mistake was probably inevitable, but it is clear that these buttons aren't needed and just take up space that could be better used.

7: You've certainly proven that I was wrong about tool redundancy, but it is still an issue that the tools are not well organized, and some tools could be simplified into one button which by right clicking would provide a drop-down context menu to select other versions of the same tool. Like the shape tools, the select area tools, the quick select tools, the grid and assistant and measuring tools, layer/image transformation tools, color-work tools, multibrush & Dynamic brush, etc. as well as adding separators to further categorize them. This I hope you can agree with, right?

I am being considerate of newbies, I am suggesting this so that newbies will be more easily impressed at first glance at the program, rather than unimpressed. Having a professional look out of the box goes a long way. The only thing that was inconsiderate of beginners was the removal of the brush menu, but I think I successfully proved that it is less useful than we give it credit for where it is located by default. You might argue that removing the reference images subordinated to the tool options and add shape might be bad for beginners, but I argue that it is a bigger crime not to have the overview enabled right from first launch, it is a much more important feature in my opinion, and I was delighted when it was finally added

Thing is that we also have to look at the simple fact that this program is not easy to learn, easier than photoshop, possibly easier than corel as well (which is a great feat for a program with this level of complexity) but people are, if they want to keep using the program, going to take some time aside eventually and try to learn it. But to fuel their desire to actually want to use the program, initiative must be taken to impress them into liking the program, am I wrong?

1366x768 is still a very common resolution in lower end consumer notebooks. It's widespread enough that we have to care about it.

There is some redundancy in some places, but a lot of users like it. Not everybody is entirely gear towards shortcuts.

1) You need to have at least some kind of statusbar to show a progressbar and the zoom stuff.

2) MyPaint has it in version 1.1 on my system by default. Could be hidden tough.

I said there was a roughly 50/50 split between low res and 1920x1080+ right? I wasn't implying that the low resolution display users should be ignored, far from it, since you have various layouts installed with the program, a layout can always be present (and you have done this, you have SD layouts and HD layouts as you call them which is really 4:3 layouts and 16:9/16:10 layouts) that works out well for this kind of low res display as well.

I'm talking about the default, the one that is selected upon first launch, it should be catered towards modern and future technologies rather than dying ones. Soon enough 1920x1080 will be the new 1024x768. We'll be wondering how we could live with such a low resolution today.

You shouldn't ignore it, you should just not prioritize it.

1) Yes, I already said, the zoom stuff can be moved to the top right to be on the top-bar instead of status bar, the other information (like color profile) can just be located in some other window that has to be manually opened (preferably through the help context menu) and progress bars? I would like them to get a special place at the center of my screen when I need to pay attention to them, but not on screen at all when they're not in use. Like most other programs do.

2) In fact just to double check I installed a fresh version of MyPaint 1.1 on my arch Linux installation as I wrote that post to check. By default it only has a top bar displayed. It's a program that was really set up so that artists could just open it up and start painting without worrying too much about the interface and where everything is (everything is in the same place after all) to open additional on screen menus, there are buttons in the upper right corner to toggle them (but default they are all off)

I just downloaded the alpha build

I love the new icons on the tool and layer dockers, certainly is a step up from what was in the stable build.

Now the overview has the zoom slider applied inside it's window (just like I was suggesting above, I assume this has been around for a while then) making the status bar even more pointless than before, it now has absolutely no use at all (sure the progress bar needs to be somewhere, but like I said that should be at the center of the screen, since the progress bar should only be there when saving a file, if not at the center of the screen then it can be at least somewhere else than in the status bar)

But the parts that still need work are the icons on the top toolbar (Pattern/Gradient/Color/Painters Tools/Brush Composite/Brush Option Sliders)

So close to a new level of beauty

Should I make new threads about the individual issues? Or the most important ones? Think it will be easier to tackle them one at a time?

With the updated Krita.org, I also updated the analytics. We can actually gather the screen resolutions from people that visit the site. That should be a pretty good approximation of our user base. From last month, here is a rough breakdown of people that are on the Krita site.

These are the most common resolutions:

30% of people use 1920x1080
19% of people use 1366 x 788
9% of people use 1280 x 1024

anything at 1024 x 768 or smaller is 2-3%.

Not sure if that helps decisions at all.

Thats a valuable post Way more contextually valid statistics than what I posted, again it seems to be about 50/50 split between high res and low res. with 30% on FullHD and 30% on lower resolutions (I'm sure everything beneath 1280x800 is a mobile phone, and as such Krita Desktop is not applicable to those devices)

My reasoning in favor of having a 16:9 centered UI rather than 4:3 centered is that with this given 50/50 split, when people buy themselves a new monitor today, there's about a 99% chance that it'll be in the 16:9 aspect ratio and 1920x1080 or higher resolution unless they are buying a TV or Mobile Device, even most laptops nowadays have 1920x1080 resolution, the only exceptions are the very very cheapest ones which are these 1366x788 resolution guys. But quite honestly, if they are using hardware like that they should be sticking with software like MyPaint that has low resource use. Krita is a fat beast so you generally want an up to spec system to run it, at least in terms of memory and CPU.

But basically, when people will upgrade, they will upgrade to a higher resolution, and if we already have a roughly 50/50 split between high res and low res users, the default settings (not the only settings, just the default layout) should be catered towards the more advanced technology, it is also a way of future-proofing since it means people who have a new computer or just upgraded theirs can use the default layout out of the box and feel happy about it.

And just to support my logic, all the commecial software (photoshop and painter for two) do this as well. It's usually a good idea to go with what most people are going to have rather than what most people used to have.