5 ms·
Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the
by thibaultamartin 3y ago
Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time.
This kind of article is super valuable since it gives us the perspective of a new user. I opened https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 to translate the gripes mentioned in the issue into actionable items for us. I took action on the most urgent one (updating the Try Matrix page), but want to take the time to go beyond the surface symptoms and address the root cause of the other gripes.
On the Foundation side, we're a small but mighty team of four. The website is currently maintained part time by me and a volunteer who is doing an excellent job at it.
As I wrote recently in a blog post "Tracking what works, not people" (https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/ https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/), I would love to have the resources to conduct user research and user testing on the website but I unfortunately don't. We deployed privacy-preserving analytics to see where people drop and what confuses them. It's not nearly as good as proper QA and user testing, but that's what we can afford for now.
Overall I'm grateful to the author for documenting their frustration, and even more grateful for reacting constructively to our responses and integrating them in the blog post! One of the strengths of open source is to find and address issues collectively. I consider this blog post to be a good open source contribution.
If people around believe in our mission and want to help us with their brainpower, I invite them to join our "Office of the Matrix.org Foundation" room: https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org
For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.
- gowings97 3y agoDo you have any thoughts on how you might improve this workflow?
- thibaultamartin 3y agoFor the matrix.org website, we landed https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/2179 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/2179 as a quick fix, but we can do better. I think there are several things we can do improve, and the process should be fairly similar with Element: 1. Refine who the website is for, and what they are coming here for. We need to narrow down who our audiences are, what they want, what they known and don't know, and how we can best serve them. 2. Conduct user research with a diverse set of people representative of who we think our audiences are. We need to sit down with them, ask them to create a matrix account unguided, and ask them to comment what they are doing and how they feel about things. One of the difficulties of the website is to find the right balance between not overwhelming the user with difficult decisions (picking a client? picking a server? I just want to chat with my friends!!) without being too biased. We need to be opinionated to guide newcomers through a decently simple process, but we need to leave room for all the vendors to thrive.
- gowings97 3y agoWell stated! I wish you luck (I just donated a bit as well)
- thibaultamartin 3y agoThank you very much, every little bit counts!
- oohffyvfg 3y agomost of those complaints are talked about weekly on the element/elementweb own rooms at matrix. also, i myself gave up contributing small fixes because you don't host source map files and I'm too lazy to setup a dev env.
- IanCal 3y agoHi, hopefully things came across OK, for clarity I wasn't saying "why haven't they done this, they're bad at QA!?!?!" but just wanted to say that most of us should be doing the same kind of thing with our own products/tools/sites and give a shoutout to QA peeps. Thanks for working on matrix, I'm building some things on matrix and it's been pretty interesting. > For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out. Great highlight, I've donated.
- thibaultamartin 3y agoThanks a lot for the kind words and support!
- selimthegrim 3y agoIs there a good reason why the password workflow is so much worse on mobile than on desktop for matrix?
- jtbayly 3y agoJust wanted to add that I signed up recently and wanted my wife to sign up too. I managed to figure it out, but the article is correct. Even down to trying to figure out whether I should use Element or ElementX on iOS. I also realized that my wife would never figure it all out.