I’ve been working in usability since last May, but I’ve been studying usability independently for the last few years. At least one time during every usability test, we discover what we call a “head smacker”, which is essentially something that is so simple, and so right-on, but it was just overlooked for whatever reason.
Due to time constraints and a $0 budget (we make zilch on SimplePie), I decided to simply trust my own usability experience when I was putting together the website and writing the content. What that means is that when this site launched in January, you all became our usability testers. Although we haven’t put together a survey or anything to see what your thoughts are, we do keep our ears to the blogosphere and pay attention to what people are saying.
When we put together our documentation pages, we had assumed that our target audience was a little more PHP-savvy. As it turns out, as SimplePie gets more and more popular, we’re finding that many of our users are relatively new to PHP, and just want a simple method for getting feeds on their site.
Now, there are many ways of doing this, and we’re mulling over a few ideas… some will wait for 1.0 final, but others can come sooner. But the ‘lowest hanging fruit’ solution was head-smackingly simple: better documentation. I’ve taken several hours over the last few days and rewritten a few pages to be clearer — mostly focusing around getting SimplePie installed in the first place. We’ve also put together a simple SimplePie Compatibility Test, which will make it dead-simple to know if your webhost has the necessaary pieces installed to run SimplePie. Next up, will be to add more tutorials and code samples to illustrate how to do both simple and more complex tasks with SimplePie.
Please keep the feedback coming. We strive to be as responsive as possible in our support forums, and we keep track of what people are saying about SimplePie via Technorati, Feedster, Digg, and our Mint stats package. We’re listening. 🙂
