Re: My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

Petter Andersson wrote:
> 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.

We part ways here then. I think that Vista was a huge improvement over 
XP. Windows 7 is pretty amazing and almost all of what's great about 7 
debuted in Windows Vista. The problem with vista wasn't bad design. It 
was lack of polish and lack of a compelling new browser when browsers 
were increasingly the killer app.


> 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.

I think you don't know or you're discounting what actually happened with 
Vista. Vista user experience was fairly well designed, but there was a 
war between the .Net/CLR (Avalon) platform and the win32 platform and 
there were some overly-ambitious behind the scenes platform goals like 
winFS (remember that?). Because they couldn't pull off a new front-end 
in .Net/Avalon and all that, they had to restart development back on the 
classic win32 platform and that put them behind. Once behind, they were 
in a position where they needed to ship before they could get all their 
features polished.  But the features were good. They're the backbone of 
Win 7 which is the best thing Microsoft's ever shipped.


> 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.)

All reasonable things to discuss in a usability forum. What this has to 
do with whether or not the version number appears in the Help->About 
dialog, I'm not at all clear.


>> 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.

Yeah. That's pretty crazy. I guess I grew up different than a lot of 
folks. My parents taught me that if I'm upset enough to threaten someone 
physically, that I probably need to walk away.

> 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.

That doesn't make them any less unacceptable. I don't care how upset 
anyone is with a decision about a piece of software, threats are threats 
and any tolerance of them is too much.  If you disagree, and you think 
that threats of violence are OK in an open source project, I'd love to 
hear you make the case for that or to tell me which other projects 
accept that as normal.

>> 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.

I think you mis-characterize an unfairly malign design philosophy when 
you say it's "designing for the dumbest imaginable user".  Mozilla has 
never done that and never will. We design for the widest possible 
audience with the resources we have. That audience isn't dumb and I 
suspect that the overwhelming majority of them would object to you 
characterizing them as such.

Advanced users have advanced skills and can customize a browser more 
ways than they can any other piece of software on the planet -- and 
that's all browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, even IE. Firefox has always 
been and will hopefully always be the most customizable browser exactly 
for the reason you opened with: to give the advanced users (and even 
some of the less advanced users) the features that they want that aren't 
necessarily applicable to the largest possible audience.

So, being spartan and being customizable are not at odds here at all as 
long as customization is easy and the variety of customizations is wide.

I believe in customization. It's one of the reasons I've been a part of 
the Mozilla project for the last 13 years. It's one of the reasons I was 
willing to join the Product team. I want Firefox to be the most 
customizable browser on the planet and with such usability that anyone 
can customize Firefox in what ever way they want.

Firefox answers to no one but you. Firefox is your user agent on the 
Web. Firefox fits you like a glove. These are just taglines to some, but 
they're why I'm here. Power users have an ally with me. I'm the guy that 
wants more than any other to see customization become so easy and so 
powerful that no one would even consider another browser. But I'm also 
very considerate of the people who don't need to or want to customize 
and I think they should have an experience with Firefox "out of the box" 
that "just works" and doesn't require learning an overloaded, 
heavy-weight, or power-user focused interface.

- A