Previously Steve McMahon wrote: > The Plone 4 Framework Team has been selected. Congratulations to: > Matthew Wilkes, David Glick, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Laurence Rowe, > Martijn Pieters, Erik Rose, and Ross Patterson. As anyone who's been > following Plone development will immediately see, this is an awesome > team!
That is an excellent group of highly skilled people, my congratulations to them. I am however very disappointed by the fact that this framework team only consists of highly skilled developers and does not have anyone with user interface design experience. Plone used to have a very clean and simple interface, but over the years it has become more complex and disorganised, and as a result we now too often see new people being confused by Plone's user interface. The people who used to have a lot of influence over the user interface design of Plone (people like Alexander and Geir) are too busy with other things these days, and that is very noticable. Plone desperately needs to make good UI design part of its process again, and that is something that developers simply can not do. I have had the pleasure to work a lot with UI designers this year and I have learned very directly that our developer minds are simply not wired correctly for it. For the Plone 3 framework team we have Danny on the framework team: he is not a top-notch developer but has he a lot of UI design experience, and that has already proven to be a very positive influence. For Plone 4 that kind of experience is even more critical since we aim to not only refactor a lot of the Plone codebase but also its entire user interface. Hence my surprise when the new framework team does not contain anyone with proper UI design skills. I have heard the argument that the framework team will consult with UI designers where needed, but that is exactly the wrong approach and will lead to the situation we have right now. User interface design needs to be part of the process, not an optional component. I strongly suggest that this decision is reconsidered and someone with proven UI design experience is added to the framework team. Regards, Wichert. -- Wichert Akkerman <wich...@wiggy.net> It is simple to make things. http://www.wiggy.net/ It is hard to make things simple. _______________________________________________ Framework-Team mailing list Framework-Team@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/framework-team
