I’m going to ramble on a bit more about Shuttle, simply because it’s been a pretty big part of my life the last year and loads of things I’ve wanted to talk about on this blog have been waiting for this moment in time. Everytime I would think about something cool to talk about relating this project I always had to keep on the mental shelf until after I got to this stage.

I'm going to do a Kevin Smith in Jay And Silent Bob (see sidenote), so I'll address some of the comments sent out regarding Shuttle. First off just so that everyone's clear on a best case scenario I thought 70% of the people who saw the final Shuttle product would love it and really appreciate the attention to detail that we have placed in the design. I also knew that 20% would ABSOLUTELY hate it and finally there was the 10% that didn't really care either way. I'm a realist (as well as an optimist). I know you can't please everyone, if you try you'll die trying. The objective of the game is to make sure you stick to what you know, question everything you do and plow forward. Sometimes it'll hit a cord with people and recieve wide acceptance, othertimes you'll be faced with a situation in which you have to reassess where you were coming from.

People expected the second coming for some reason. The simple thinking behind joining forces with the likes of Michael, Joen, Chris, Bryan and Joshuas was that by joining forces with these exceptionally talented people, at the top of their game, we would get something that would far exceed anything I could have come up with on my own. Make no mistake about it, without everyone’s contribution we wouldn’t have the mockups you see before you. They would be INFINITELY different and IMHO much weaker.

The problem however with this situation is that INSTANTLY people’s expectations were raised. Some people were expecting the second coming and didn’t get it. To be fair though we never promised you the second coming. We promised we’d do our best to make the WordPress admin beautiful and usable to people of all levels of experience with the programme. Some might forget that we’re not catering just to the power users; we’re catering to the every users. That’s a tough thing to do correctly, and that’s part of why it took as long as it did… but only a small part.

Of course then there are those that feel that the admin didn’t really need to change at all. I obviously disagree with this assessment COMPLETELY, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone down this road in the first place. However this is a VERY important comment to take note of. You see change is feared by a great deal of people. In fact that’s probably (amongst many other reasons) by Matt will be implementing the design incrementally. WordPress got to it’s current popularity based on the fact that the software does what it does, well. Add to that list the community behind it; and finally the simplicity of the UI design.

The Shuttle team obviously saw room for improvement as we belive it’s not the prettiest to look at. Some might then argue and say:

Well hang on, it does the job right?

That there is a programmer’s mentality, not a designer’s. So right from the very start (I remember clearly) Joen tried to push the idea that the overall structure that the interface currently has is not incorrect fundamentally and therefore we shouldn’t be looking to change that just for the sake of it. Michael then kept hammering the ideas (through his comps) that if it’s not needed STRIP IT OUT, keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it clear. On the flip side we had Matt telling us some seriously weird things you guys do when using WordPress so we had to factor a bit of that weirdness in there as well. However don’t try and deviate from what has been established as a core unless there’s a serious reason. Those reasons would then get hammered back and forth, between Denmark, England and the US on a regular basis.

For those that are thinking that this is just a design exercise and won’t get included fast enough, I think you’ll find that if you’re running WordPress 2.0 the integration of Shuttle has already begun! What you think Matt woke up one morning and decided to add the colour blue from the previous grey? Or that those drop-down-draggable menus in the write section appeared on their own? All things that came about from the Shuttle project. Admittedly they’re not as we mocked them up at the time, however we hadn’t progressed to the level we are now at the time those areas were being implemented in the code. I now officially feel like Morpheus in the Matrix after Neo gets his ass whupped in Kung Fu.

Many lessons were learnt during this design process however we’ll keep it at this for now.