Software Development and Usability

As part of their coverage of the Howard Dean campaign, the latest issue of Baseline magazine includes a profile of Six Apart (and Mena and myself). It's a fairly broad piece on the company, including how it started with the development of Movable Type, and how we got to where we are today. We're happy that the article will help to introduce Movable Type and TypePad to the IT sector and honored to be featured.

One place where the article does disappoint, though, is in its suggestion that I (Ben) am the sole person responsible for developing Movable Type, which is not correct.

From the article:

So Ben, a software developer, built a program that gave Mena everything she was looking for.

I'm sure this is something most of our users would realize is incorrect, considering the level of influence Mena obviously has on the product and with our users. But it's an idea that has been repeated enough that I think this is as good an opportunity as any to bring it up: Movable Type (and TypePad) is, and has always been, jointly developed by Mena and me, and she is every bit as much a "software developer" as I am.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing it, but I think that it shows a general misconception about what software development is. I know that if I had solely developed Movable Type, it would have been completely unusable. The trouble is that "usability" and "architecture" are fuzzy terms that can't be very well quantified or judged, whereas "programming" is not. As a consequence of this, it's much easier to see "programming" as driving a product than "usability" or "architecture", but in reality, a poorly-designed product is just as unusable as a buggy one.

The thing is, I think one of the reasons that Movable Type is so popular is because the product combines element from both Mena and me. And I don't know if it's a female-male combination or if it's just the combination of our personalities, and frankly it really doesn't matter. But of the articles that do focus on us, I'm still waiting for the article that goes beyond "they're so cute" or "Ben created Movable Type", and tries to get at something core to software development: what factors contribute to creating a great product?