How do novice users experience the Web IDE
What’s this issue all about?
The Web IDE is now in a Viable
state, but a lot of the work has focused on the experience and functionalities for more experienced developers. It's tough for novice users to get started with working inside the Web IDE, especially if they are not developers and have none/minimal programming experience.
In addition to that, our dogfooding approach is great for enabling us to work on the problems we encounter ourselves, but it also makes us blind to problems that other user groups would encounter. This monthly research session will not only be recorded and shared within the team, but at least one other team member will also be present to observe and take notes. This will allow us to expose our team members more to different users.
How are you going to recruit users?
In order to keep the planning and effort minimal, we are going to recruit from our own new hires pool, but focusing on non-engineers. As soon as we have a date set for the study, we are going to check which new hires are going to start within that week.
How will the research get executed?
As we also want to keep the extra effort minimal for the interviewee, we are going to observe them while they add themselves to the team page. This is a task that every new hire has to do eventually, so we are not pushing more work onto them. It's also something that a lot of new users currently struggle with, so we can potentially not only improve the Web IDE, but also make that process easier.
As I know that our amazing researchers are all currently very busy, and as we are interviewing other GitLabbers, I would be comfortable leading these sessions myself, as long as that's not a problem for the research team.
What questions are you trying to answer?
The topics we are investigating in these sessions are the basic and fundamental functionalities of the Web IDE. but from a different viewpoint than the one we currently focused on with our dogfooding approach.
What assumptions do you have?
There are a lot of low hanging fruit that would make the UI more transparent, easier and help newer users get started with the Web IDE while also benefiting experienced users. Aspects such as navigation, icon usage and help texts will probably come up rather often.
What decisions will you make based on the research findings?
These insights will help us discover the most obvious problems new users encounter when using the Web IDE the first time and allow us to create a better experience for these cases.
When will the research take place?
As we are currently discussing switching to Theia, these sessions will start no earlier than %12.3. From then on, this will be a recurring research session, as that allows us to have a constant evaluation whether newer features influence the first time use experience. It also helps tremendously with getting different team members direct insight into the experience of our users.