Creating an App Developer Website

Good afternoon everyone, as David said, my name is John Oxton and I am a user experience architect on the web team at Canonical. I have been with the company for a few months and this is my first assignment.
I will be using the word ‘we’ quite a lot as we go along and this is just a shortcut to represent a group of very busy people (inside and outside Canonical) who have given their time generously to this project, not because they have to but because they care about it deeply and believe it to be very important to the future success of Ubuntu. In that light my contributions to this project really are very modest compared to theirs.
Ok, enough with the Oscar acceptance speech, let’s get on!
As has been mentioned the goal of this site is to help get more and better apps into the Ubuntu Software Centre.
From the developer.ubuntu.com website point of view that is an interesting challenge and not one we can possibly hope achieve in one step.
Where to begin?
The first question really is what is an ‘app’ anyway? Is LibreOffice an app? Is Mozilla’s Thunderbird an app? What about Chromium? Skype? Firefox? Well the answer is yes and each a very good one but also advanced and relatively mature and, importantly, already on Ubuntu.
The point being, for this upcoming release we aren’t really targeting developers of these kinds of apps because they are already working it out.
Of course, nor is the aim to exclude them.
Instead we want to start a dialogue with individuals, or small teams, with an “itch to scratch” or small indie developers/companies who are already making small, useful, or just plain cool, apps for other platforms.
With that in mind we shaped two personas, and the journeys we’d expect them to make, to reflect these sorts of developers and began sketching ideas about how we thought we could encourage and support them through the app development lifecycle.
For those who’ve never encountered personas here is a brief summary from UX mag:
“A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like."
Find out more at http://uxmag.com/design/personas-the-foundation-of-a-great-user-experience
This is what we sketched: http://madebymake.com/
To access the site: Username: developer and Password: ubuntu
Please keep in mind that our focus here was on the structure of the navigation and the general concept of the site so the visual design seen here is in no way representative of the finished site.
Feel free to click around, most pages are present; I’ll grab a much needed cup of tea whilst you do.
With that done we hired an independent research company to help us test this prototype. We did this because we needed someone neutral to help us really dig for what was good and what was not so good.
From there we recruited a cross-section of ‘app developers’ who were developing for a variety of platforms; some professionally, some in their spare time.
We ran them through the prototype you have seen, asking them about their expectations before they clicked through to different pages but also talking to them about their usual app development workflow to see if the site could be truly useful to them.
David, meanwhile, ran an in-depth survey to give us some quantitative data to support or challenge what our qualitative research was suggesting.
These sessions and the survey were incredibly important. They challenged all of the assumptions we had made and helped us verify that our personas were even closely matching reality.
In short the response to our first prototype was fairly unanimous: We like where you are going but this isn’t right.  It also started to hint that our personas were close but not quite close enough.
With the first round of testing complete we went back to the drawing board and considered everything we’d learnt.
So what did we learn?
What came back consistently was: marketing sucks, so just stop it. I just want to ‘Get started’, tell me how to proceed. Give me an ‘Hello World!’ app to play with and I want really good documentation. Oh, and packaging, I don’t like thinking about packaging if I can help it.
Just ‘Get started’, hmmmm, this is where things get challenging.
Linux, and therefore Ubuntu, prides itself on having a rich, flexible development environment which is great but also has the potential for confusion for people just starting out.
On the back of the findings we felt we really ought to be a little more decisive and dare to be a little opinionated because without that the site won’t have the clarity it needs to attract developers to the platform.
Thankfully the springboard for that was already in place in the form of Quickly (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly) and after much debate, for now at least, we’ve put it up front. We have stated that THIS is the way to get going when developing for Ubuntu.
We are aware that this might be a somewhat controversial decision to make and we have been careful to show that there are other options but Quickly delivers a route in and a good one as it elegantly stitches together classic, and very powerful, Linux development tools.
Very importantly it also helps with packaging.
Something our research has suggested is that whilst great apps are being written for Ubuntu they aren’t making it all the way into the Software Centre. Packaging seems to be part of what’s stopping that happening
Thinking about Quickly, and the tools it brings together, helps shape our content strategy for another important area of the site: Resources... or Reference... or Documentation (we’re still trying to decide what we should call this section).
Whatever it ends up being called, the potential for this section of the site is enormous and our research suggests it is an area that really could improve the success rate of apps hitting the Software Centre. But there is a problem.
There’s so much content for this section, generally, but it’s all over the place, it’s not well organised in one authoritative spot. On the flip side there’s not enough of the right content to help those people who are just getting started; or if there is it’s a real struggle to find it.
Getting this section right in one hit is impossible without a bigger discussion with developers. So we’ve scoped it carefully and our message will be clear: We need help with this!
Which is where you come in. To begin with let’s keep things simple and engage with you, the community, around a single topic and from there build up the infrastructure we need to make this site something truly special.
So what next?
Before we get to that I just want to share a couple more rough sketches with you so you can, hopefully, see the difference the testing made to how we approached the flow of the site. We tested these yesterday and so far they've tested pretty well:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24134/developer/Home.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24134/developer/getstarted.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24134/developer/resources.jpg
This really has been a very quick skip and a hop through a quite detailed process and I’ve had to boil it down to what I think is the essence of it because I want to leave space for Q&A.
Suffice to say, the site will go live fairly soon and, once it does, we start listening and we start talking. When we launch, we consider it the beginning of something, not the end. This is when the UX processes really start to kick in.
As I said, I am still fairly new to Canonical and still have to get to know the Ubuntu community better and I need to work out the best ways to collect qualitative feedback and turn it into something actionable.
I will be talking this through with David, and others, as time goes on.
My first step, though, is to try and plan a workshop at the upcoming UDS so we can investigate any issues that come up in detail, with the aim of coming up with some big themes on which to base future work as well as how we engage with developers in an ongoing discussion about *their* site.
Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy your new developer site and find it useful when it launches.
Thank you.