A few days ago, someone opened a support thread about AllTerrain Forms and, in the middle of otherwise useful feedback, wrote something very direct: “I hate OpenStation.”
Obviously that is not the nicest sentence to read when you are working on the product, but at the same time it immediately got my attention because this is exactly the kind of feedback that can be useful if you don’t take it personally.
So instead of trying to explain why OpenStation is good, or why we made certain decisions, I asked a very simple question: what exactly makes you hate it?
Her answer was actually very good.
She works on a laptop, so screen space matters a lot. OpenStation was opening windows too small for her workflow, which meant that one of her first actions was always maximizing them. She also didn’t like losing the visible URL because she regularly copies URLs into emails, project trackers or messages. On top of that, her users are not very technical, and from her point of view OpenStation was adding another layer to WordPress that she would eventually have to explain and support.
She basically said that browser tabs already exist, users understand them, they use the whole screen, and they don’t hide the URL.
And I think this is exactly where building software becomes interesting, because from our side all of those decisions had reasons behind them, but reasons don’t really matter if the final experience is worse for the person using it.
None of these are theoretical product discussions. They are very concrete things that someone hit while trying to use the software for real work.
That matters a lot to me.
We started discussing these points immediately, and one of them has already made it into the next OpenStation release.
Users will now be able to choose how new windows open: using the current default behaviour, maximized, or focused. Focused mode maximizes the new window and minimizes the other windows on the same desk, so people working on smaller screens can have something much closer to the experience they expect.
This came directly from that kind of feedback, and the implementation is already merged:
PR #964: Preferences: choose how newly opened windows appear
And this is really the point.
We obviously have our own vision for OpenStation. We believe WordPress can have a much better working environment than the traditional admin experience, and there are many things we still want to explore there. But having a strong idea of where the product should go does not mean pretending every decision we make is correct.
Sometimes the most useful feedback is not “great release” or “this looks amazing”. Sometimes it is someone telling you that a window is too small, that they want the URL back, that something scrolls when it shouldn’t, or simply that they don’t see the benefit of what you built.
That kind of feedback forces you to look at the product from outside your own head, which is probably one of the hardest things to do when you have been working on it every day for months.
For me, OpenStation becoming more mature is not only about adding more apps, more features or more ambitious ideas. A big part of maturity is improving all those small things that make the product feel natural, predictable and less annoying to use.
And I think there is also something important here about open source. People can complain, explain exactly what does not work for them, and a few days later they can literally see the code that changes that behaviour.
That is a pretty healthy way to build software.
So yes, tell us when OpenStation is great, but especially tell us when it sucks. We may not agree with every suggestion, and we obviously cannot build every requested feature, but if there is a real problem behind the feedback, we want to understand it.
In this case, someone said “I hate OpenStation.”
Fair enough.
A few days later, OpenStation got better because of it.
