Tag: WCSF

Momentum. Jeff Veen’s talk from this year’s WordCamp San Francisco. Lots of good advice about what makes for a good meeting and an effective working environment. Hat tip, Sheri.

Lessons from new user workshops

At August’s WordCamp San Francisco I helped organize and run a new user workshop on the Friday and Saturday of the 3-day conference. The next month I did the same thing for Portland’s WordCamp. There’s a lot that we can learn as creators of software by doing events like these. I think we need to do more of them.

New user workshops teach us so much about how users actually approach software. There’s not a more honest way to know how difficult or easy your software is to use than to try and walk a roomful of people through how to use it.

With a maturing project like WordPress this becomes even more true. It’s at a point where it can do so much that it is overwhelming to many people. They don’t know where to start. Somebody with no prior experience using your software is remarkably effective at finding the areas that are not easily understood. They are not shy about telling you what’s broken.

These workshops taught me that things need to be simpler. There are so many options to click on after loading the Dashboard. It’s too much. The first Dashboard load in these workshops was greeted, in many cases, with a look of overwhelmed confusion. Many people were lost and they hadn’t even started.

One thing that held true through the workshops was that the easiest features to explain were those most closely aligned to concrete actions on the site. Screens like the discussion settings and custom menus were almost impossible to comprehend. Others, like the Typekit font preview on WordPress.com, were immediately grokked and loved. Too many things in the Dashboard are abstracted from what they actually do on a site. Publishing shouldn’t be done in a control panel.

By gathering dozens of new users into one place you can also learn how people use software on various devices. We had people at the workshops using everything from a netbook, to MacBook Pros, iPads, and more. It was actually amazing how much of the workshop people could follow on nothing more than an iPad and an external keyboard.

Not only can we learn about the strengths and weaknesses of software, but we also learn how invigorating it is to have people using the tool we work on. At Automattic, I spend all of my day working on user support. Helping people publish on the web is what I do. To that end these workshops were refreshing. I had the opportunity to help everyone. From eleven-years old to a seventy they all walked away with a great looking blog.

I’m cleaning up the outline we used for each workshop into a curriculum of sorts that could be used by anyone to run their own new user workshop. The more events like these we can hold the better WordPress will become.

Post formats in WordPress

Ian Stewart, of Thematic fame, gave a terrific presentation at WordCamp San Francisco about how to use post formats in your WordPress theme. The video is now online and posted over at ThemeShaper.

He’s also made all the slides available to download if you want to save them for later reference.

If you’re looking to make your site more flexible and better able to handle various types of content I highly recommend watching this all the way through. Great stuff.

Post formats significantly changed how I write and made a digital commonplace book possible. If you’re not using them on your site right now you’re really missing out.

WCSF: How the web works with Jeff Veen

Jeff Veen opened Sunday’s sessions with a talk about how the web works. He started with a story about beer and how 200 years ago the only way you could have a cold beer was if it was winter or if you were rich and could transport and store ice.

Frederic Tudor was an entrepreneur who turned ice into a business. He became quite profitable and later realized that he could make a greater fortune by shipping that ice to the Caribbean and all over the world.

Technology marched on and people found ways to create ice in warehouses that did not need to be shipped. It could be stored and created locally. The companies that were successful warehousing ice did not successfully transition to ice in the home. Newer entrepreneurs eclipsed the traditional businesses.

A similar thing happened with gold transportation. Wells Fargo and American Express were experts in the stagecoach business. However, they anticipated the changes coming and restructured their businesses around the conveyance of information instead of the shipping of physical goods. They made this transition rapidly too, needing only a few days.

So the question is, are we building companies like the ice warehouses or like the gold businesses? How do we know which path our business will take?

We’re in a similar situation now where incumbents are losing ground to services like Hulu, Spotify, and Pandora who are native to the web. The same thing is happening with typography.

The ability to embed web fonts has revolutionized the model that foundries have relied upon as their business. This is what Jeff is doing at Typekit. They’re trying to help foundries be like the gold companies and less like the ice warehouses.

So as we look back we realize that the ice industry was less about ice and more about health. The gold industry was not about moving bullion from San Francisco to New York but was about transforming wealth into data that could be communicated. Likewise, media is not about selling assets but is rather about services that make consumption seamless.

The qualities that contribute to the success of the web are also what will make us successful.

On the web the thing that wins is that which generates rough consensus and has running code. It’s the code in people’s hands that ultimately is successful. The first person out with running code in front of users can generate momentum.

Jeff also quoted Jeff Atwood who says:

The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could.

Jeff Veen uses Twitter to see if the code deploys they’ve made that day are impacting the experience of users in a positive way. Iteration will get you closer and closer to perfect.

In other words, “The speed of iteration beats the quality of iteration.”

We’re putting our most valuable memories on the web with Flickr. We’re also creating a collaborative record of human history with Wikipedia. The web is not dead, in fact it’s never been more vibrant or successful. To keep it that way we need to protect and advocate our open systems and avoid the walled gardens sold on a broken concept of safety.

Geocities is an example of these walled gardens which can just be shut down by a single company. As Jeff said, “There are literally people who don’t give a shit about the web.” That’s who we need to protect the web against.