Skillclouds developer happiness

On most of the projects I work on we spend a great deal of time looking at user experience and making the end user enjoy a site. Sometimes an equal amount of time is put into the back-end design with an enjoyable cms interface. Very rarely is the developer who has to set up the project considered in any user testing.

When programming code for the open source community it is a completely different approach. Whether contributing a plugin to wordpress or a library to jquery you're putting the code out there to your fellow developers for peer review, and they become your primary stakeholders/target audience.

After showing out SkillClouds code to a number of developers at the recent JISC dev8d developer happiness days we took the opportunity to extend our user centred design approach to the users who have to install, configure and implement SkillClouds in other Universities.

We started off asking developers about the SkillClouds documentation/readme file - the structure, the style of writing, how much detail they like and generally how ours could be better. Lots of very obvious things came up you might not think of when your head is so far into the code - just the same as during front end user testing.

At the next stage we started looking at code, and got some very nice comments from all the testers about the structure, variable names and general semantic nature of the code.

There were some conflicting views on data structure, with the general view being that to integrate SkillClouds into another University's systems it would take a developer, as compared to a systems administrator. Automated database installation was not seen as a good idea, but an abstract data layer was seen as helpful. There were also conflicting views on complexity vs object oriented abstraction, and how these might increase project set-up time.

Our approach of providing 'dummy data' so as SkillClouds runs straight out the box was given a thumbs up with, apart from a permissions problem, all users having a working demo almost straight after unzipping.

We are now refining the SkillClouds code based on the developer feedback - a big thanks to all involved!