I’ve been meaning to comment about this, and was reminded by today’s Coding Horror.

Funpidgin, a fork of the popular Pidgin Instant Message client, was created when Pidgin developers had diverging opinions on how the input box of the chat window should resize by default. According to the Funpidgin website, What makes us different from the official client, is that we work for you. Unlike the Pidgin developers, we believe the user should have the final say in what goes into the program.

Four words I have to say to Funpidgin: Users Are Not Designers.

This attitude takes participatory design to all-new (and very dangerous) level. You go from user-centered design: keeping users in mind while designing a product, to user-directed design: catering to every users’ whim without consideration of the consequences (at least, users who know how to use mailing lists and bug trackers, who are not representative of a broad user audience for an instant messenger client).

What you end up getting is this:

Good luck guys.