Re: My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

On Aug 17, 2:28 am, Asa Dotzler <[email protected]> wrote:

> If you think that Mozilla should make decisions about how it develops
> software based on a tiny self-selecting sample of people who know how to
> participate in online discussion forums, you've got a very different
> view than I do about how to develop software that is growing from half a
> billion to a billion users.
>
> I'm not dismissing your concerns or your feedback, but the proposal that
> we should design a product based on such a small sliver of feedback is
> basically a non-starter.

Exactly the tiny self-selecting sample membership is the key here;
we're here because we're way above average technically, usually
quarter of a century or more computing under our belts. That in itself
is a merit. It would be ludicrous to expect all one billion to take
part in design process. Pareto's principle must apply; I'd wager less
than 1% are interested and 99% aren't. (Except for, why doesn't my
browser behave like last week and the years before that.)

> Even if you represented a majority of users, that's still not how we
> design software. We are not a democracy and have never been a democracy.
> Mozilla is a meritocracy with an decision-making system that dates back
> more than a decade and which places final authority in the hands of
> individuals who have earned it through good works on the project.

Things that do not make sense, do not make sense. Case in point: would
you call Windows Vista a triumph in UI redesign? Because I wouldn't.
That was an exercise of pointing a shotgun at a perfectly functional
UI (WinXP), firing, and seeing where everything lands. Whole thing
felt quite arbitrary - not to say futile. Firefox 4.0, IMO, did bit of
the same. I see nothing wrong with old Back/Forward/Reload/Stop/Home
arrangement, with tabs below address bar. (Actually, tabs above
address bar is less efficient arrangement to anyone who has back/
forward buttons in their mouse; such person has no need to reach for
back/forward buttons, but tabs get more/most frequently accessed and
"on top" is simply a slowdown at that point.)

> Again, that is not to dismiss feedback, yours or anyone else's. I
> appreciate almost all of this feedback (I actually read it all) -- with
> maybe the exception of the people calling for me to be murdered or
> otherwise physically harmed.

That is certainly good to know. As for physical harm, I'm pretty sure
there are many who are feeling emotional enough at this moment to send
you death threats and to promise to beat you up, or whatever. But,
reality check: these things do not, thankfully, materialize. We're
geeks and nerds, not the Taliban. And IMO there are no good enough
reasons in realm of zeros and ones to physically harm someone.

> But successful design rarely, if ever, comes from only changing things
> when you get a majority to agree. As the old but probably not precisely
> true anecdote claims, if Henry Ford would have asked his customers what
> they wanted most, they'd have told him "faster horses".

Sure, a strong dictator with a vision is a necessity for any
successful design. But the dictator needs to be enlightened enough to
grant drones (users) enough freedoms and flexibility so they wouldn't
rebel. My view is, Firefox is headed to Chrome's general direction,
and Chrome is known as a fairly spartan browser which doesn't offer
much bells and whistles; while it's at that, there's much less user
freedom than we're used to. Google is definitely in charge. Now, I'd
hate to see all locked down, non-customizable Firefox one day which
even updates itself without express permission from me. By designing
everything for the dumbest imaginable user (general trend of computing
is, everything is being dumbed down gradually), advanced users are
going to be pretty thoroughly pissed.