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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Garth Kidd

@judell @mhoye yeah that’s how I used to run usability tests on some software for which I was lead dev and de-facto PM. I’d watch a user try to reach their goal, listen to them mutter, and STFU unless they asked for help. Three results:

I’d get as many notes as I could take in twenty minutes, without fail.

My UX design skills improved. My trust in them didn’t.

We kept finding interesting gaps between the goals of the users and those who wanted them to use it.