gambit37

Do you think we should post a better written Idea, or keep the existing one?

It’s entirely possible (though maybe not probable) that it really was Ma.tt, but speculating on it is rather a waste of our energies. What I’m more excited by is how good things came out of that long conversation that Otto told us was pointless.

I agree with Jabecker that we need more support to get our voices heard. What is the best way of getting people to vote on the Ideas? We need to publicise them better as even that part of the site is a little hard to find (Extend? — what?).

I’d rather have ugly and functional than pretty and broken, so this is still a good piece of work, regardless of Matt’s view.

I posted a response over on that blog you linked — dunno if he’ll see it, but I’m still hoping to get some kind of official statement on why the changes to the Write screen were made as it still baffles me.

If I can hear the reasoning behind it, backed up with the (empirical user analysis) evidence that the new layout is more efficient, I will gladly moderate my view.

Your HTML isn’t valid. Make sure you close all your tags!

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fm3kd.com%2Fufofiles%2F

We now have a plugin for fixing this in 2.5, but it should really still be part of the core as it used to be.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/restore-id/

Cool, thanks jabecker, looking very good!

I posted an idea about improving WordPress.org by getting clearer channels for people to offer feedback. Regardless of all other outcomes of this thread, I feel strongly that this issue should be resolved as it’s currently misleading, so if you feel the same way, please take a vote:

http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=1362

Lots on here to respond to, but the most pertinent for me:

jabecker:Mailing lists are not a place to say, “I don’t know any code but please make the admin panels usable again.”
Otto42: True, however I would suggest that maybe there is no place to say that because it is not a useful thing to say. For one thing, you fail to define “usable”. For another, it’s non-specific.

This is where I think a lot of the problem lies. Otto wants those complaining to provide quality feedback that makes sense to a developer, or better still, offer solutions, otherwise he feels its pointless. This is not how customer feedback works.

I understand where you’re coming from Otto, but you have to appreciate that not everybody can intelligently articulate why something doesn’t work as well they think it should, and some people simply wouldn’t know what you meant by “non-specific”. You’re making people work too hard to get their point across when they may lack the necessary skills to deliver the kind of useful, quality feedback that you’re looking for. But this doesn’t make their feedback any less valid, you simply need to learn how to look past their ‘flaws’ and help guide them in providing the feedback you need.

When I get complaints from customers about something that doesn’t work the way they would like, I take the time to listen to what they have to say and to try to understand what they mean. All it takes is an openness to listen, to respect that we’re all different and don’t speak in ‘developer terms’ and you’d be amazed what insightful things users come up with that maybe you’d never even realised was an issue.

When you constantly use the language you do, it puts people off responding because you seem to be suggesting that people are stupid or unworthy of the developer’s time unless they can offer solutions. I can’t agree with that and I think it would really help a lot if you could try and see things from a different perspective. You’d be amazed what a positive response you can get from people when you take time to understand them and help guide them. (For the record, I’m talking in terms of general customer feedback, not the specifics of you pointing us to the correct places to get our voices heard).

Otto42: If you have something specific and useful to discuss, then I’d suggest that the wp-hackers list would be a good place. We had this exact discussion about these exact problems 2 months ago on there, and that conversation only got 13 messages. Where were all the ideas then, eh?

Sorry, but that’s absurd. That’s like suggesting every user of any product ever made should always be offering feedback during development of something new, when most companies don’t even advertise the fact that something is in progress. It’s unrealistic and unworkable.

Most WordPress users are not inclined to follow development channels on the off chance that they can intercept and deflect a bad design decision that’s worming it’s way into the next version. But they sure will have opinion about it when the upgrade comes out and those opinions are no less valid than the opinions of the developers who made the changes.

You seem to be saying that we are not entitled to complain about these issues if we didn’t contribute in the first place which I really don’t think makes much sense.

It would be wonderful to have a place dedicated to users saying what they liked and didn’t like and wanted in the future, and developers asking questions until they could see what was needed. I’m disappointed because I thought this forum was such a place and it’s not. I don’t think that the mailing lists or Trac are either.

Exactly. Which is why I made the earlier suggestion that this forum should be made more apparent and possibly even a separate entity on the wordpress.org site. It would be a great way of getting the feedback that users want to give and would engender a much better sense of ‘being involved’ for the average user who feels threatened by the technicalities of mailing lists or trac.

There were plenty more comments on the thread that warranted responses, but I’ll just offer this:

Say you have a product that everyone loves and you never receive a compliant. You make a new version and it bombs. 10,000 people email you to say it sucks, with no constructive criticism. You have two initial choices: You can either ask those 10,000 “Why does it suck?” or simply think “They didn’t tell me why it sucks, their opinion doesn’t count.”

If I wanted to stay in business, I know which option I’d choose. (Hint: It’s not the second one!)

Finally, I’d like to say “thank you” to Otto for getting us on the right track about feedback and also to Sapphire, jabecker, eric23 for fixing up the problems we’ve been discussing. I’m looking forward to testing them out.