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We set out to leave the kickoff meeting being equipped to hit the ground running (or rather, designing). We got everyone together to have a kickoff meeting to discuss our findings and prioritize our efforts. We gathered the information we needed to get and felt good about the themes we extracted from our research. These controls were hidden by this users second monitor. We also saw what kind of weird stuff might happen around our users.īeing in the users’ own environments took our insight to new levels of understanding and helped us identify user experience issues we may have missed without this type of hands-on research. This type of research was intended for us to watch for weird workarounds for certain tasks.

We met with a few local users to actually watch them use CodePen. We knew we had to observe people (outside of Sparkbox) using it. There's so much nuance to the interface, we wanted to get a holistic understanding of what our users actually do on the site. We also knew we wanted to see CodePen in action. Here's an example interview: Interview with Nick Hehr on February 18, 2015 This created a sense of empathy for us, and left an impression on us as we moved into design decisions. We tried to steer these conversations away from specific feedback and more about their current usage. Our user interviews were mostly to get to know the actual people, so we could learn how CodePen fits into their lives. Each interview was 15-20 minutes, conducted over Skype or Google Hangouts. We interviewed 10 users from all over the world.

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The only caveat that we kept in mind was the proportion of Pro users who responded to the survey was higher than site average, so we considered the feedback to be more from that user base.įor our one-on-one interviews, we prepared a script of questions based on three main types of users (browsers, creators, and teachers). We decided we needed to set very specific goals and purposes for three different kinds of research: user survey, user interview, and ethnographic observations.įor feedback, we knew the numbers were our biggest asset, so we sent out a survey so that we could pull common themes from 500 people, instead of specific cases from just one person. We knew we wanted to get _some_ opinions and feedback about the product, but individual interviews weren't the place for that. To get the most out of user research, we needed to first carefully plan exactly what we hoped to get out of it. Increasing social interaction and participation in the community. Alex: If it becomes more valuable to put your work on CodePen because it is highly visible-resulting in users finding better work/becoming more influential.Users associating CodePen with good design/UX. Tim: Important people in community expressing positivity about the site.Here are some of their takeaways when asked what would make this project successful: Knowing their priorities directly influenced the scripts we used in our user interviews. This was exactly what we were after-a jumping off point. When talking to the three of them, there were definitely some common themes emerging.

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We used Google Hangouts to talk with the team (a free and easy way to talk with anyone face-to-face).

This helped us to not only know where their heads were at for their future, but it also showed us quite varied perspectives on what CodePen means to them. We sat down with them (well, we sat down at our respective monitors) to see what they were hoping to get out of our engagement. The very first thing we did was just get to know the guys at CodePen a little better. It was important to include stakeholder input, so we knew where to focus our efforts and discussions when we talked to users. As we both work in the same industry and many of CodePen's users are our peers, we wanted to make sure we included as much input from the community as we could. There are so many power-user features we weren't even aware of, and it is quite a robust product that we needed to gain perspective on. We began the project with a thorough research phase to gain a complete understanding of CodePen. And thus, we began tackling an extremely fun design challenge. After several conversations, the natural evolution of combining forces for an amazing redesign made sense. We've laughed together at conferences, and Sparkboxers are huge fans of CodePen as a product. Sparkbox and CodePen have had many awesome conversations over the years.