[Foundation-l] LiquidThreads almost ready for deployment

[William Pietri]

On 12/19/2009 10:54 AM, David Goodman wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 1:17 PM, William Pietri<william at scissor.com>  wrote:
>    
>> As a software developer, I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with its dark
>> mysteries. I've spent tens of thousands of hours typing mysterious codes
>> into giant files interpreted by unforgiving machines. But for the 98% of
>> humanity that doesn't have much technical background, our discussion
>> system comes across as somewhere between perplexing and actively hostile.
> mysterious codes? All that is needed is knowing how to indent and sign.
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>    

For a person with a PhD in molecular biology, a master's degree in 
Library Science, and 3 years experience on Wikipedia, I'm sure it all 
seems pretty transparent. As somebody who played with punch card 
machines in kindergarten and was coding well before my voice changed, it 
sure looks that way to me. But we're pretty far out on a few different 
bell curves.

I haven't seen an actual usability study on our current discussion 
system, but I have seen and done plenty of other usability studies, and 
my guess is that you'd get a combined drop-out plus failure rate of over 
80% for first-time users. Followed by predictable reactions: 
discouragement, feeling dumb, and taking both the system and our 
community as hostile or unwelcoming.

Whether we want to attract less technical and/or less persistent users 
is a reasonable question. (My view: we should.) But from the usability 
experts I've worked with, I think the nicest reaction they'd give to our 
current discussion system is politely disguised horror. If people are 
skeptical of that, I'd encourage them to reach out to our very sharp 
usability team; I'm sure they have opinions on this, and possibly some data.


William