Comment 264 for bug 532633

Revision history for this message
Jef Spaleta (jspaleta) wrote : Re: [light-theme] please revert the order of the window controls back to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

scholli:

I make no claim that this particular issue is as important as the emotion displayed in the discourse would suggest.

It's like when I have a big argument with my wife over something small. Once the emotions are spent and we rationally talk through why the out-of-proportion argument happened..It's never just that one small thing. It's a series of small things..and that one just happened to be the one that triggered the release of built up frustrations. More often than not the underlying problem is that one of us is not communicating well enough about requirements,intentions and plans to the other person.

Maybe the out-of-proportion response here is indicative of a systemic lack of communication from the design team about their plans and vision.

Contrast how the Canonical design team works with how the recent Gnome hackfest participants communicated what was going on at the event. http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/London2010

Out of all the listed participants on that page with blogs... how many of the non-Canonical employees made an effort to communicate back about the event to the Gnome community via the Gnome planet. I can count multiple posts from participants employed by several other companies making a concerted effort to communicate to the rest of us in the Gnome community where the design discussion was going from their expert pov. How many Canonical employees made a proactive effort to communicate what was going on? I don't remember seeing a single Canonical employee who participated in those design discussions blogging about it in the Gnome planet feed.

I mention that little caveat because I think it speaks to the underlying problem..a problem that will persist and color all future interactions with the community over differences of opinion in design decisions. That problem is a a lack of proactive communication on the part of the Canonical design leaders about what's going on. This should be a big concern for the community watchdogs inside Canonical. How the design team, and its growing influence over the Ubuntu experience could be the genesis of a systemic, insular corporate culture inside Canonical that is more concerned about dealing in a reactionary manner to community feedback as a drain on their productivity instead of proactively communicating a roadmap and soliciting the community for feedback early on in the design process.

It's really easy to brush the egregious emotion over this one design issue aside and chalk it up to a small number of malcontents. But even Shuttleworth got dragged into making uncharacteristic personal attacks in this report. That should send up a red flag. There's something else going on here that is causing an out of proportion response. And if I'm right about the underlying problem, then the communication break down between designers and the community is just going to get worse unless its dealt with.