Open Source Community Growth as a User Experience Problem¶
Date: | 2012-07-18 |
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Speaker: | Asheesh Laroia, Karen Rustad |
Slides: | http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/en/assets/1/event/80/Open%20source%20community%20growth%20as%20a%20user%20experience%20problem%20Presentation.pdf |
Open Hatch¶
- Open source community help
- User experience design
- Links
Improving User Experience¶
- Foster and encourage volunteer enthusiasm
- Create clear, welcoming entry points
- “User” in this context: contributor
- Know for whom you’re designing!
- Know the “workflow” for newcomers (shopping cart metaphor)
- It’s like conversions in e-commerce, but for code users
- See: “funnel effect”
Goal¶
Get more people down the funnel
Solutions¶
- Get more people (hard)
- Remove steps (aka remove friction)
- Research why a step eliminates lots of people
- Or make steps easier/faster/more informative
- Where in the process would you give up!
Encourage People To Edit¶
- Identify tasks to work on!
- Publish a wishlist/TODO list
- Make it very clear how to get started, setup, install
- Test your docs!
- Get people to follow the docs to install
Case Studies¶
nano¶
The text editor (that replaced pico)
- For patch docs: “send ‘it’ to the nano address”
- Send what exactly? The patch?
GNOME¶
GNOME Love project
- “Get involved” link: Good
- Index page: too much detail, confusing/overwhelming
- Get involved steps are in the wrong order
LibreOffice¶
Easy Hacks project
- “Developer” and “Contribute” links: Good (both link to same page)
- Build step is optional and last resort: Good
- List skills required for each step: Good
- List of “easy” hacks for suggested fixes: Good
UX Cookbook of Strategies¶
Fedora Design Bounties¶
- “One-click shopping” for OSS contributors
- Quarterly blog post announcing winner w/ prize
- Winner gets committer perms
- Specific tasks: reward is LOVE
Open Hatch Training Missions¶
- Cross-project skill checks
- Automated training sessions
- Learning without embarrassment
- Clear progress tracking, improved feedback
Gentoo GSoC Tracking¶
- Quantitative community mgmt
- Interns check in regularly w/ mentors
- Iterative tracking of the progress to a goal
Wikipedia Revert Message A/B Testing¶
- Auto-detection of vandalism to pages
- Discourages legit new/undeducated users
- Rejection sans rejection
- How to reject patches without crushing souls?
- Rejection email links to “Talk” page
Summary¶
- Better retention is possible
- Diversity is key!
- Consider accidental bias by high barriers to contribution
- If you ask for specific help, you’ll probably get it!
- Delegate to users (“You: fix this!”)
- Wishlist/todo list is a Good Thing™.