In part 2 of the Uncovering your product's unique insight email series, I teased that having developer chats can help you design better developer experiences.
How so?
You can ask questions related to how people learn. By doing this, you can start to form a picture of how your developer persona has learned about other frameworks and libraries in the past to help inform your own DevEx like your docs, API, SDKs, etc.
When doing developer chats for DevEx, what you want to do is try to map out the developer journey: where do they start → where do they end. How do they move through your learning materials and end up adopting your product?
Taking a page from The Mom Test, during our interviews, we focused on how they learned stuff in the past (not what they think they want). We asked questions like:
- What docs sites do you really like? Why?
- What was the last library you had to learn?
- Where did you go first to learn it?
- How was that experience?
- What did you do next?
- Was there anything missing?
- Have you ever watched a video to learn a tool? How was it?
One example someone shared was learning React. They said they really liked the new React docs, especially the interactive examples. BOOM. That's a helpful data point. They said they definitely prefer "prose style" content like documentation and see videos as a way to get a quick introductory overview to "see it in action" (their words). For context, this was a senior React developer.
Not only did we learn how this person prefers to learn, but we also learned what we could be doing better with the Excalibur docs – namely, we need more examples (and if they're interactive, we know they're going to be more useful).
Once you've had enough chats where you're asking the same questions, you can start to build a Learning Empathy Map based on the patterns and insights you see.
What's a Learning Empathy Map? I'll show you an example in the next email 🥰
Have a lovely day,
Kamran
