Mono’s “Usability Disaster” and Platform Discovery Optimization
Seeing this post from Miguel about a major cock-up pertaining to the developer download experience in Mono made me think about the platform companies we’ve been advising.
Companies often trick themselves into thinking that every developer who discovers their stuff will automatically do whatever it takes to use their stuff. But developers actually make very calculated cost-benefit choices about what technologies they want to adopt — in a world in which time is at a premium, doing nothing is always an option. If developers feel jerked around or not fully supported, they’ll turn their attention elsewhere. Certainly there are some developers who will slog through anything to get to what they want. But ultimately developer adoption is a numbers game; in our experience a sizable percentage of developers who encounter a platform will abandon it without adopting if the developer discovery experience isn’t fairly solid.
We advise our clients to own their platform discovery process from the
first pageview to the time a developer performs a download, and to
test this flow frequently. We generally recommend against permitting any part of the developer discovery process to be owned by a third party. A good example of this is Sourceforge — what they provide in terms of hosting and presence does not make up for their horrible user experience and very unfortunate practice of showing advertisements for competing products at the very moment the developer is about to hit the download button for your product.
One of the consulting products we
provide for clients with existing platform products is a developer
discovery analysis. The idea here is to go through the process of
getting up to speed with a technology platform, and then provide
recommendations to the platform provider (our client) as to what they
can do to optimize the process of developer discovery. Often the
recommendations we make are things that the client knows should be
fixed, but often our recommendations are enough to motivate them to
actually fix the problems.
This is a fairly quick way to get very detailed feedback (with screen shots, written recommendations for remediation, etc.). For start-ups that aren’t quite to the point where they can afford a product manager, it’s a cheap way to get a quick dose of help in the area of platform product management and developer user experience optimization.
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