If a feature or product were legitimately easy the user would not be writing in to support about how stuck they are. Sure, some percentage of users will find questions to ask about any interface. But do you want to start the conversation by assuming the user falls into that percentage? You venture to learn much more if you assume the software is wrong, not the user.
— Andrew Spittle, “Avoiding Easy”

This post by Andrew on avoiding the word “easy” in support is golden, but perhaps predictably, this is the part that stood out when I read it. If your user is confused, chances are, the software is wrong. No bugs necessary.

Required reading is what Andrew linked to in this paragraph: Joe Flood’s blog post about a comment Matt Mullenweg made at WordPress DC last summer, “The software is wrong, not the people.”

Did you know that before you could write crazy shit on Tumblr and WordPress, people had to type their crazy shit up on what was called paper — and distribute it by hand, reaching the few paranoid conspiracists within walking distance.
— Jon Stewart

That was The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Tuesday night, referring to Ron Paul’s decades-old newsletters. Just another way to describe democratizing publishing.

Bonus: Ron Paul’s 2012 website runs WordPress. And he’s not the only one.

Double Bonus: Comedy Central’s Indecision site is WordPress too. (I knew thedailyshow.com wasn’t, but it didn’t take long to find one that was.)

Updated with the clip:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

When explaining this to developers at conferences, I generally mention the preference panels in Adium, a Mac OS X chat client. It practically has an Advanced tab for the Advanced tab. Stuff everywhere. Problem is, when there are too many options, your users can’t find any of them.

Open source doesn’t need to be this bad. One of the tenets of the WordPress philosophy is Decisions, Not Options:

When making decisions these are the users we consider first. A great example of this consideration is software options. Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration. As developers we sometimes feel that providing options for everything is a good thing, you can never have too many choices, right? Ultimately these choices end up being technical ones, choices that the average end user has no interest in. It’s our duty as developers to make smart design decisions and avoid putting the weight of technical choices on our end users.

Buried in the annals of WordPress, a release philosophy document was heavily inspired by the writings of GNOME contributor Havoc Pennington. On preferences, he wrote (nearly 10 years ago) —

It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits – and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don’t understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar.

• Too many preferences means you can’t find any of them.
• Preferences really substantively damage QA and testing.
• Preferences make integration and good UI difficult.
• The point of a good program is to do something specific and do it well.
• Preferences keep people from fixing real bugs.
• Preferences can confuse many users.

I find that if you’re hard-core disciplined about having good defaults that Just Work instead of lazily adding preferences, that naturally leads the overall UI in the right direction. Issues come up via bugzilla or mailing lists or user testing, and you fix them in some way other than adding a preference, and this means you have to think about the right UI and the right way to fix problems. Basically, using preferences as a band-aid is the root of much UI evil.

WordPress is known for its simplicity and usability, but I can still think of a half-dozen options I wouldn’t hesitate to remove under the right circumstances. Many WordPress plugins subject their users to too many options. Don’t add settings screens simply because you know how.

Challenge yourself. Learn to decide.

WordPress 3.3 introduces a new welcome panel designed to provide a better experience for new users installing WordPress for the first time. It’s a great idea, but one that may not work for all multisite installations. So I’m releasing a plugin that networks can use to dismiss the panel for new sites and users.

Try Hide Welcome Panel for Multisite, version 1.0. Only works for networks, and the plugin must be activated from the network admin.

Want to know how it all works? The plugin’s inline documentation contains the technical details.

The New York Times print edition is a great way to test your memory of what you read yesterday online.
— Comedian Andy Borowitz

So true. Tweet.

The WordPress 3.3 credits page was updated today, for likely the final time. In five months, there were nearly 1,200 individual changes to WordPress (and counting).

The credits page lists every individual who contributed to the latest release. A few stood out for their contributions, not just of high quantity, but of tremendous quality: Dominik Schilling (ocean90), Cristi Burcă (scribu), and Sergey Biryukov. The three are listed as contributing developers to 3.3. The core team — including guest committers Jon Cave (duck_) and Daryl Koopersmith — worked with these three daily, and they had a collective hand in nearly every major task this release.*

There were also three individuals added to the ‘Recent Rockstars’ group for their recent contributions to core development. This release we chose Chelsea Otakan (chexee), Helen Hou-Sandi, and John Blackbourn (johnbillion). All together, the six contributing  developers and rockstars we’ve recognized contributed more than a fourth of all Trac comments and two-fifths of all props.

If you want to see the full list, click the WordPress icon in the 3.3 toolbar and head on over to the credits page, or wait for the release post (coming soon!). Maybe I’ll also experiment with a word cloud again as I’ve done in the past.

In WordPress 3.4, we plan to recognize first-time contributors on the page, so if want to see your name in lights on the credits page, contribute to WordPress.

* Fun fact: Average age of the five mentioned in this paragraph: 23.

In preparation for that, I went on a tear yesterday and contributed to six posts for developers on our main development blog. The posts were a mixture of tutorials and API documentation what’s new and what’s changed in 3.3:

• Admin Bar API changes in 3.3. An overview of what changes might break your plugin, how we’ve tweaked the terminology and APIs for 3.3, the new Groups concept, and how to move and modify menu items.
• What to watch for: Javascript and Editor changes. There were quite a bit of changes here. jQuery was updated to 1.7.1, the current version. The full jQuery UI is now included, and was updated to 1.8.16, also the current version. And then there’s an example for wp_editor(). The QuickTags API (the HTML editor toolbar buttons) was rewritten, and we’ve improved both wp_localize_script() and wp_enqueue_script().
• New API: is_main_query(). I introduced this function and WP_Query method during my ‘You Don’t Know Query’ talk in WordCamp Portland in September.
• Do not include wp-admin/includes/template.php to get add_meta_box(). I’m not even sure where to start with this one. When developing 3.3, we found that some plugins were doing something wrong when trying to call add_meta_box(). (Really, really wrong.) So consider this post a protip.
• The admin_user_info_links filter is gone. This needed to happen since we combined the admin bar with the admin header. Not too many plugins were using it. This comes after we dropped favorite actions in 3.2 as the UI continues to be refined.
• Help and screen API changes. This post goes through the process of adding new help tabs, as well as how to use the screen object to determine the context of the current page. I spent a lot of time fleshing out WP_Screen in 3.3, so it was nice to see it all summed up in just a few hundred words.

WordPress 3.3 — coming soon to a site near you.

Via Andrew Spittle.