You’ve probably heard the analogy that being a heterosexual, white, cisgender, Christian male is playing the game of life at its easiest setting. Most things are aimed at you, from consumer products on down to expectations. Being those things causes you to come from a place of privilege, even if you’re poor. The world is aimed towards you a little more, and your default assumptions are ‘correct’ because media and everything else reinforces them.
Sometimes when I look at the choices and decisions we make in Open Source, I think we’re falling prey to the same concept.
The day after my team lost the World Series in 2016, I found myself struggling through an emotional (and chemical) hangover, whereby I was pretty much half the speed at thinking as I normally am. In this state of mind, I decided it was a dandy idea to sit and do some serious UI testing of products for myself as well as WordPress core. It was surprising, enlightening, and humbling.
I know WordPress. I know it really, really well. I use it daily, I write it in it every day. I monitor and support end users. I review code every day. Rarely has 36 hours passed without me learning something new about it, but also seeing a hundred people making the same mistakes. I often tell people “If I can’t figure out how to use your plugin, based on the readme, you didn’t write it well enough.” A new version of this is that when hungover me can’t figure out what your plugin does, there’s a lot more wrong.
Related to this is the tone and language in which I am wiring to you this very moment. I write from a place of decent education and intelligence. I use words like obsequious and peradventure from time to time, not because they sound cool (though they do, I like the sound of words) but because they draw your attention to the point in different ways.
This proves beyond peradventure that the intent of the name of the product was to leverage the name of its competitor.
I don’t actually send plugin emails with that stuff, no matter how much I think in that way. It would make people think I’m talking down to them.
Which brings me back to my point.
We, who create for WordPress, are in a place of exceptionally high privilege. We name drop people like Helen and Mark and Matt and Mike (no, the other Mike) without a second thought because they’re a part of our lives. We’re not trying to seem high and mighty, but these are people with whom we’ve played Cards Against Humanity, or had churros, or sat on a bed giggling like tween girls. We’ve made a tribe with people we see daily, virtually, and they’re a part of our norm.
But to the average WordPress user? They don’t care. Or if they do, they care jealously. And worse, when we say things like how we talked and made a decision about them without their input, they feel left out. And they were. They were intentionally, mindfully, willfully left out.
We felt our default assumptions were correct.
We felt that we knew better.
We felt, based on our experiences and usage and tests, that we were right.
Well. We can be wrong. We know this. Often we trust our heads more than our hearts, making amazing mistakes by assuming we know the best from our expertise. And the biggest fallouts when it comes to our work will be in those moments. When we decide “this is right” without taking the time to use our product hung over, or to ask for more help, or to trust that gut feeling.
This is incredibly hard to do. When you consider WordPress, there are times a feature will make it to Beta and we’ll realize we were wrong. Post Formats UI, anyone?
As gutting as it was to pull that so late, the decision was wise and sound. Not because this wasn’t something people wanted (and might use) but because it’s implementation wasn’t up to snuff. It was a fundamental feeling of ‘this is wrong.’ And Mark trusted his heart in the moment and said even if the code was fine, there was something off in the using. He understood the implications, too. That how the UI was implemented would influence future work.
It’s difficult to explain how huge that is without sounding like I’m making a mountain out of molehill or fighting a strawman. The decision we make in WordPress, in any project, do not live their lives out in a vacuum. The decision to make widgets, featured images, categories, custom post types, and on and on all have influenced how future features are designed and built. We know this. So when we introduce a new feature, a new flow for using features, we have to consider the future.
And that means we need to forget our privilege of someone who knows the code, who knows the system, and who has all the benefits of experience. We need to be the first time user, the uneducated, the newbie. We have to accept that we will be wrong, and we have to be willing to admit our wrongness. To fail to do this means we’ll never learn.
Comments
One response to “The Privilege of Default Settings”
This is a version of the conversation I attempt to have with clients who are creating and managing their own content. “Try to see your site as a user who doesn’t already know your organization.” What I have discovered is that some people (most people?) have a really hard time doing this– seeing things from another perspective. Maybe we should think about it as a skill, like writing code or getting SEO improved– and if seeing your plugin or site or app from the perspective of a newbie user is not in your wheelhouse, be sure to find someone who can help you with that.