Cleaning up the Blender UI

The story of Blender is quite amazing. Over the years, Blender has become incredibly powerful. And this is reflected in the user interface. With Blender 2.5, the goal was to introduce more consistency, more structure and logic into the UI. This has helped set Blender up for the future: It's more expandable, it's more flexible and it's easier to use.

However, all these additions haven't really tackled a core issue with the Blender UI, which is visual complexity. Look at this screenshot from Blender:

It has:

• 103 strings of text
• Many visual boxes
• Many lines and dividers
• Many irregular lumps of items
• Many small gradients

All these boxes, items, text strings adds enormous visual strain for the user. Here is a visualization of the main hard lines in the UI:

This shows how heavy the UI is. My hope for Blender is that it can become lighter, calmer and easier on the eyes. For Blender to embrace KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid - and to follow Dieter Rams design philosophy of 'Less, but better'.

So, why is simplicity in interfaces good?

• Reduced clutter
• Fewer disturbing points of focus
• Takes up less space
• Fewer strings of text
• Let users focus on content
• Is calm and relaxing to look at
• Lets you concentrate on a few things and present them well.

How are we going to simplify the Blender UI?

• Reduce amount of unneeded lines, gradients and boxes
• Use hierarchy to move rarely used items into menus
• Remove unnecessary items entirely
• Rethink some features to need less buttons
• Add more whitespace
• Promote the content itself

So, I've done a little exercise to try and clean up Blender a bit:

Phew! This looks like an application that is inviting. I want to use it! It looks fun and light instead of heavy and daunting.

You'll notice that I've done a few things. Firstly, I'm starting from the improvements that Brech van Lommel introduced in his Cycles branch. On top of that I've made these additional changes:

• Removed a bunch of dividers and gradients.
• Removed boxes around some items, such as Window Selectors
• Shortened some strings of text (Object Mode -> Object)
• Removed Blender icon in header (not useful information)
• Removed all the gibberish data text in the top right header. This could optionally be presented in n overlay.
• Simplified Window and Scene selection widgets (Put Add and Remove buttons inside the popup menu)
• Simplified Material list widget. There was much redundancy here.
• Simplified Toolbar
• Hid arrows in number widgets. This could appear on mouse roll-over

Below are a few focused examples of the changes:

Here you can see that I've moved buttons into the sub-menu. The Add/Remove buttons don't need to be visible in the top level UI.

The Material list is another example. The previous version had many unnecessary and duplicated items. Renaming, moving, selecting, adding, deleting, linking and unlinking could all be done with this simple UI. 

The properties list itself is also much simpler here. This is an image from the Cycles branch by Brecht van Lommel, which demonstrates how calm and simple properties can look when you arrange them in a cleaner way. This also makes items easier to eye-scan items vertically.

EDIT:

Here I've added an example of how to do cleanup work. This is the 3D View header in edit mode:

This shows the header could go from the current jumbled mess to a cleaner version.

Another thing that goes with this simplification of the UI is screen space. Let's examine the original screenshot, this time with an overlay that shows how much of the screen area is used for displaying content:

Based on area, slightly less than half of the screen is dedicated to the 3D content (green) while approx 52% of the screen is dedicated to UI controls.

Compare that to this:

Here, approx 20% of the screen is comprised of UI controls, and the vast majority is used to display content.

I'm excited about Blender's future, and with a few changes the UI could become calmer, cleaner and simpler.