[wp-testers] Center

[Doug Stewart]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:41 AM, Matt Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:

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

No, it's nothing like that.  I swear, the sooner our media culture
breaks their Iraq Tourette's, the sooner we can stop seeing reductio
ad Iraqum arguments crop up in the most inappropriate places.

>  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.
>

I think people are reacting harshly /because/ this particular
development effort hasn't been particularly Open Source in its
incarnation.  Those who have been leaned/depended upon in the past for
their code contributions have (felt/been) ignored as far as their
input goes on the design side.  History will ultimately prove whether
that's a good thing.

>  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.
>

As a supporting piece of evidence for Matt's overarching point ("We
need a new, thought-out design created by people who DO design for a
living", if I'm reading correctly), take a look at the Habari project.
 The project itself was founded out of a sense of frustration with
existing WP development and design methodologies and the first few
revisions of the admin backend have been a design-by-committee
mishmash.  Only recently has Michael Heilmann (of Kubrick/K2 fame)
stepped up and offered to be Admin Design Dictator.  He went through
and, with an eye to design, did mockups and site layout and took the
back end in a single, unified direction.  It's still in the
development stages, but I do think it's a direct piece of evidence as
to Benevolent Design Dictatorships being perhaps a better way to
handle things when aesthetics are on the line.

>  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.
>

But Matt, here's the problem: you have a whole slew of faithful users
that bring nothing BUT preconceived notions to the table when
approaching a new release and when you flippantly dismiss their input
because a whole bunch of n00bs like paper mock-ups, well...

>  The plural of anecdote is not data.
>

Properly collated and plunked into a database, it sure is.

>  As we[sic] 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.
>

Not an apt analogy. In that case, the guy is messing around with his
OWN money, and has every right to do so.  He's got the freedom (and
the right) to ignore good advice and make bad decisions.  I think what
you're missing is that, when it comes to actual users, you're messing
with THEIR money when you mess with the design.  In essence, the money
manager has been day trading with other people's money.  I'm sure you
see where folks could object to that sort of behavior.

>  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.
>

My snark Geiger counter just pegged.

Matt, I think a lot of this comes down to: major changes like this
whole rework could be handled MUCH better on an organizational/project
level next time anything similar is undertaken.  I think a lot of
frustration folks are exhibiting is due to the like-it-or-lump-it aura
that you, in particular, have given off about the whole affair.

As always, just my own $.02.

-- 
-Doug

http://literalbarrage.org/blog/