Mastodawn

mhoye Sep 2, 2023

Re: this earlier post: https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/110991950899025738

One of the things I'm most proud of in my last gig was adding notes to our getting-started docs saying explicitly "if this process fails for you, this is a bug and we want to hear from you."

Granting explicit permission to file bugs against the _get-involved process_, quickstart docs particularly, is another way of saying "we care about the details of the experience of getting involved in this project and community", and it is very powerful.

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mhoye Sep 2, 2023

There is such a thing as community accessibility, of the ergonomics of getting involved. It is _extremely common_ for smart, determined people to hit failure after failure during an install process, and decide this project or community just isn't for them. Open Source projects often end up self-selecting for people who coincidentally have not just hardware or software but _cultural expectations_ identical to the primary developers, because all of those failures are completely invisible.

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mhoye Sep 2, 2023

As one example - a bunch of our docs said "copy and paste this command:"

> command whatever blah

... and people were copy-and pasting "> command", with the caret and it was failing because of course it was.

Absolutely trivial to fix, but a completely invisible non-problem to anyone who's grown up in a console. But what designer, or technical writer, or translator or or or, would reflexively understand the problem wasn't them?

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Jon Udell Sep 2, 2023

@mhoye I think about this all the time. What rarely if ever happens: the author of the doc is forced to watch a designer/writer/translator fumbling around making those mistakes. Or the creator of a web app is forced to watch people trying to enter phone numbers into forms. Or really any designer or builder of a product is forced to watch people struggling to use it.

I'm not talking about focus groups. I'm talking about chaining builders to chairs, gagging them, and making them actually watch.

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mhoye Sep 2, 2023

@judell My friend Blake once said this about the critical importance of not just user feedback, but actually watching humans use your site or tool or thing or whatever. His line was, "you'd think to yourself, users do what? But then you find out they do nothing _but_ 'what'. 'What' is 90% of all they ever do."

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Richard Hendricks

@mhoye @judell This was a fascinating view from someone having his non-gamer wife try to play some popular games. It's interesting how she approached problems outside the box of the devs preconceived notions and how an experienced gamer would expect. Not offering any help really opened his eyes on how weird some game mechanisms really are.
https://youtu.be/ax7f3JZJHSw?si=CA2KmXWEukXVMYgc

What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

YouTube