[wp-ui] Intros

[Ronen Hirsch]

Dear Friends,


My name is Ronen (http://www.iamronen.com) and I live in the north of 
Israel in a small village called Elkosh 
http://www.iamronen.com/2009/03/elkosh/.


3+ years ago I left behind a 15 year information technology career in 
which I specialized in systems analysis, management and the last two 
years were dedicated to digital product design. I am a Yoga practitioner 
and teacher and I play Shakuhachi 
http://www.iamronen.com/2009/04/sounds-of-shakuhachi/. Since my break 
from the business of technology I have immersed myself as a photographer 
in an artistic exploration with improvisation performance artists 
(http://www.stillcreation.com). I am currently involved in numerous 
self-initiated projects and rarely work commercially.


I encountered WordPress ~3 years ago and have enjoyed it greatly both 
for expressing myself and for enabling others to communicate with the 
world. I have since moved to using mostly open-source solutions and have 
great respect for the people leading in this direction. I have been 
looking for a way to give back to open-source by contributing my product 
design skills. I have recently begun interacting with the Mozilla 
Raindrop team and am now looking forward to partaking in this new 
WordPress process.


For me product design is a process of choosing and pursuing a purpose 
(for a product) with care. Though I can contribute on the UI/UX level my 
patience for these details is limited - I believe that too much noodling 
around with these details can be a sign of lack of direction and is 
often done at the expense of actions that have a higher leverage and 
more impact on the product. I feel that **as an end-user product** 
WordPress has been making little and insignificant progress since 2.7.


I have two distinct purposes in mind for WordPress. One is a REALLY 
simple blogging platform (in the direction Tumblr is heading) that 
anyone can use. The other is an open-source substitute for Facebook - an 
application that every-day-non-blogger people can use to store, 
communicate and socialize with other people online. I would love for 
WordPress to reach many more people then it currently does. I believe 
that inevitably most people will have (many already do) an online 
presence - I prefer that that presence be established on open-source 
software and self-owned solutions (I collect my thoughts and resources 
on this issue at: http://www.iamronen.com/ontekusuto/).


I feel that WordPress is still waaaay too technical and addresses mostly 
needs of technically-minded people. I believe one of the core reasons 
for this is that, like all the other open-source projects I have 
encountered, it is dominated and led by developers.Therefore, I believe 
this effort to bring designers into the process is a wonderful 
undertaking and has the potential to break new grounds for open-source 
software (which generally suffers from poor product design). I am not 
pleased to find that it will be limited to narrow UI perspective - but 
maybe that is an inevitable starting point - time will tell! I believe 
WordPress deserves not only better GUI/UI but also an open high-level 
discussion of where it is headed - a discussion about purpose.


Thank you Jane & Automattic for initiating this process.
All Things Good

Ronen