Gregory's ServerAll other companies work with data like "the user scrolled this far, looked at this text for this long, then clicked this button"... I have none of that on joinmastodon.org. I have no clue how people use the site, and there is no way for me to know if the Mastodon servers linked from it receive sign-ups from it or not. That is to say, its design is a blind guess and its effectiveness a mystery.
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@Gargron At work we do lots of user testing, and that means sitting with a person who has never seen the product before and watching them use it, asking them questions, but never coaching them. We learn a lot more from that than from any metrics or A/B tests. @brunoph I need something like that! How do you organize it? Where do you get the random people? @Gargron We have a small team that organizes these tests, so I don’t know a lot of how we set it up, but I will ask them and let you know. @Gargron That was quick. The two main resources we use is usertesting.com and testingtime.com @Gargron For an app used by an undefined number of different users in different environments, with different backgrounds, education, and requirements, such metrics don't really tell you anything useful. @Gargron I wouldn’t discount working with one anyway. A professional UX designer might be able to highlight gotchas and issues that you are blinded to because of familiarity. Besides, metrics help when there is a particular activity or task you want to optimize for. I’m not even sure that applies for Mastodon, considering how different behavior might be across communities.  1/2 I think you won’t know if sign-ups are generated following a visit to joinmastodon. It would require some callback or ping to a stat server at the end of the subscribe process, which won’t likely happen impossible unless a Mastodon setting allows instance to ping joinmastodon back. Generally, starting with metrics means entering a loop of measurement, refining, analyse, measurement… which is costly and – personal opinion – should be avoided on rather simple UI / user journeys.  @Gargron Eugen, I very much support this whole thing you're considering about consulting UX professionals, and I hope you do it. Just confirmed I will be working with a professional UX designer starting later this week to figure out how to improve the joinmastodon.org onboarding flow.  @Gargron unsolicited advice but I think that you should have trademarked "Mastodon" much earlier in the game. Now you have sites using different top-level domains that all purport to be "Mastodon" and it's a huge source of confusion. @jon Eh I dunno about that, defending a trademark is a lot of ongoing (lawyer) work, constant vigilance, if you fail to do so once you lose the trademark @Gargron bringing this back up, imo you *really* should consider enforcing your ownership of your software's branding - people are spinning up instances with confusingly similar names to your own instances. example: See if you can get someone from one of the free software associations (like @conservancy) to advise you on your rights here. @jon @conservancy I don’t think anything can be done. It’s not like I could buy up all similar domains. The ship has sailed in 2017 when mastodon.cloud, mastodon.network, mastodon.xyz etc have popped up. @Gargron I'm not a lawyer but I don't think the ship has sailed. You still hold the rights as the creator of the project, but if you do do not assert them it would dilute your branding. It all depends on jurisdiction as well. Consulting a lawyer would be your best bet. On the other hand, you don't want to burn your goodwill with your community either and choosing to enforce your naming rights may be seen in a bad light. You can probably get free advice from folks in the community though. @Gargron Well... metrics are important but what you described is more like b-2-c POV, to get users to buy/spend money on products they are offered. Those things are more for marketing (and advertising?) to measure website effectivity to influence a user. Placing a simple tracking (ie. GA or similar) to see if onboarding works or not ie. if joinmastodon feeds signups or not. @Gargron I know I had a lot of trouble getting started with Mastodon. I didn't want an instance focused around a specific community or interest, and was looking for something reliable that wouldn't randomly go down or disappear. joinmastodon.org doesn't really have an easy way to search for these criteria, and the only instance I knew of was mastodon.social, but having everyone here kinda defeats the point of a federated network? |
I'm considering consulting with a professional UX designer about it, but I do wonder if they'll be able to do anything without any metrics at all. I have a feeling metrics must play an important role in UX design nowadays...