[wp-testers] Center

[Matt Mullenweg]

Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> Wow, the guy who brags everywhere how he's doing an open source product 
> and is therefore so much better than the others who don't do open source 
> finally admits that he doesn't care for open source.

That's like saying someone can't disagree with the war on Iraq without 
being unpatriotic.

WordPress was started because myself and the other founding devs were 
horribly frustrated with the ease of use of the other tools out there, 
both open source and proprietary. In the past five years many other 
projects have started because of similar situations, like Mozilla Suite 
and Firefox.

Our efforts thus far, which have been open source and with the 
philosophy I described above from the beginning, have done pretty well. 
Along the way we've often tried new, sometimes seemingly unpopular 
things. We've been right and wrong.

We've done "design" pretty much the same way since we started, with one 
brief experiment with design by committee which failed horribly, and it 
seemed like a good time to experiment with a different approach to try 
and get better results.

Instead of coders or backend people dabbling with usability and using 
anecdotal evidence about their family members and spouses, why not take 
people for whom usability and design is their life's calling and 
full-time job with a great body of work, have them talk to and more 
importantly WATCH a statistically relevant sample of current and 
potential WP users interact with the current design and architecture and 
try to make it better with NO PRE-CONCEIVED NOTIONS of how it should 
work, other than being guided by their research.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

As we any client services, we could ignore their advice and steamroll 
them, like the guy who pays a money manager and then day trades all 
night long, or you could put the hard work into choosing the best people 
in the world, and trust them, letting them do what they are better at 
than you.

I'm sorry if an 11th hour ad-hominem attacks and poorly presented 
personal opinions aren't going to change anyone's mind. I'm also sorry 
that you're taking my time away from the people who have been giving 
well-reasoned and constructive criticism, so I'm going to end this email.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://automattic.com