 You guys never get those really really long support tickets and I'm talking about the tickets where the user seems to think that you need all the details and I'm talking about the the entire back story like how events in their childhood led to The career path that they ultimately took and how they one day quit their job and started this website Which had technical problems and that's not the website. They're emailing you about today We'll get to that one in about eight paragraphs You know those kind of tickets where you feel like you need to put a bookmark in it halfway through you guys never get any of Those we get our fair share of tickets like that. Sometimes we also get tickets like this though Which I Like this ticket. There's a lot It's pretty cool. I love the polite high at the beginning not wasting any time or bites on punctuation And but my favorite thing is how weird our language is and how it allows me to imagine that The user's problem is actually without bringing their comfortable clothing But jokes about their phrasing aside What their real message was this and I think that's something that we can all relate to Because usability is about Expectations our users are not blank slates when they encounter our creations They do have expectations in their measure of our usability is the degree to which those expectations come true If our thing does what they expect it to do in the way they expect it to do it They will consider it easy to use the problem though is that User expectations change. They're not constant. They are constantly changing and They're always changing in the same direction Users will continuously expect easier and easier Experiences and this is because their X their expectations are ultimately shaped by their cumulative life experiences and thus Usability experiences an inflation like effect You guys know about Inflation it's it's that thing where you've got some money you put it in a box And you leave it for a few years and you take it out of that box And somehow it's it's worth less than when you put it in the same money, you know Just worth a little less well usability is a little bit like that in that if you create Say an interface and then leave it untouched for extended period of time It will then receive lower grade on usability tests than it did when you initially created Here's a an illustration of this phenomenon which fascinates me where you take something which is functionally unchanged and Forgive the alignment issues It's something which is functionally unchanged and just measure customer satisfaction over time This is this is something that is essentially the same the only difference is the expectations of the user Which is why in 2008 I see no cell phone service and I think to myself bummer I can't make a phone call right now, but in 2018 if I see that I'm going ballistic because that's totally unacceptable I'm threatening to switch providers There's actually An academic model for this and it's known as the Kano model and it describes how Aspects of any offering which initially delight customers will inevitably inevitably eventually become basic expectations Maybe the famous five-minute install anybody that is You know a part of WordPress which at one time was like an exciting competitive feature And now not quite so much So according to the Kano model anything anything like that a feature which is at one time exciting and competitive Eventually becomes commonplace and essentially required Here's a quick example Using our own plug-in. This is data meticulously gathered from our annual user surveys Which asks users why they chose and continue to use our plug-in these are write-in answers not multiple choice And this is the percentage of users who Wrote ease of use or simplicity as all or part of their answer in response to these questions Now in this time period The interface has changed very little in fact I would argue that has become marginally easier to use in this time period And still users do not cite ease of use as frequently as they did This illustrates that inflation effect that I was talking about where if you don't touch it It does in fact get a little harder But a frustrating problem that we have is our our tendency to make these experiences even more difficult through our own Increased complexity through the ill-advised iterations that we go through and the feature bloat that we just can't resist implementing and if we were to Compare it again to If we were to compare it again to monetary inflation we could say That taking all of your money, I mean no, they're creating in an interface and Leaving it untouched is kind of like taking all of our money and putting it into a piggy bank and Similarly, if we were to say that we create an interface and we make it Increasingly complex over time That's a lot like taking all of our money and investing it into the XFL The pressure though is really on us Tony Tony horror wrote a great piece called the Emperor's old clothes and I recommend reading it and in it he wrote this fitting quote about the usability of Software relative to the natural world Which I think is worth a little reflection on But really as I said we have a lot of pressure on us as software creators Our users are surrounded daily by incredible technological innovations, and I'm talking about amazing Technology like the Garmin You know like GPS navigation devices there. They're the greatest Right. They usually get you where you need to go without that many wrong turns along the way except GPS navigation devices are so 10 years ago Kind of This is a punchline kind of like a Lot of what we do in WordPress And and this is something I'm serious about actually I think we have a long way to go folks We're selling garments in an age of iPhones And just look how quickly users can disappear This is one an example of one technology which watches relevance and user base rapidly decline when more convenient and simpler alternatives appeared Sometimes I Think that in WordPress we feel as though users should be grateful to us because we're not making them manually configure my sequel tables but The truth is like we've still got a long ways to go and we can do a lot better every time We ask users to manually update and to copy and paste their Their license keys is to learn our pseudo code syntax and and to edit PHP files and and download zip files and FTP Anything and to create another account We're falling short And on that last point and just how many username password combos does it take to run an online operation? I don't know. It's a lot. It's too many I can say with confidence that it's way more than any first-time WordPress These will ever expect and I don't understand why I can navigate my life in the physical world with a modest keychain Consisting of only two or three keys at most but to run even the most basic online operation I need dozens it frustrates me and rant. Let's go back to our products and reflect on our product roadmaps a little bit. So the question for you is Where exactly is usability on your product roadmap? usability must Be a priority for every single release. We cannot afford to ever stop actively Making our experiences easier and more intuitive It's not something that you can achieve one time and then you're good to go This is a question that I never get tired of asking It it drives me and it also drives our team This is this is our biggest challenge, but I think the one most worth our time and energy And so as you do your own reflection on the experiences that you create Whatever you're responsible for your themes your plug-ins your software even the websites that you are in charge of Think about how you can make these experiences a little bit more intuitive and The fact that it is necessary for all of us to actively do this without see-facing until the end of time and Maybe here's some brainstorming ideas Let's just throw out a few ideas Examples of what we could do potentially to improve our experiences and make them a little bit easier Are there ask yourself are there things in our our UI which are Uncommonly used and we could remove from most prominent views Do we really need our users to Register for an account or create a brand-new one? Do we really need to make them download the files to their computer? Do they have to manually copy and paste these keys? Do they really have to manually upload those files? Is there any tasks that they perform regularly which we could potentially automate for them? Is there anything we could pre-configure for them? Is there anything that we're asking them to learn when we could instead rely on knowledge They already have I've got these in a lot of other questions On the next slide my slides will be easy to find you can use these just like brainstorming ideas But for now really all I want is for all of us to get out there and start making things easier Altogether do you have any questions? Well he asked Have a question over here hang on a second. Hi Kyle Can you go back one slide please because that's what so there's a question on there That says is there anything we are making users learn which could rely on knowledge They already have can you give us an example of that because that sounds like a really interesting question Hmm, okay on the spot for an example Angie. That's always fun. I've seen You know Product creators and WordPress like we argue about this sort of thing a lot and Sometimes like rail on other product creators who do things like make an interface and an admin interface that doesn't match WordPress and one could argue that that's kind of like breaking the mold a little bit and You know suddenly there's different types of menus and different color schemes and different language use and The experience is a little bit different than what the user is kind of Used to but that's I'm more looking for like Functional tasks the user must perform for example You know like if there's an editor based experience and in order to productively use it the user needs to understand a unique Set of technology like for example short codes, you know That's something that is only in WordPress and the syntax for it is WordPress specific and sometimes you know We might make an experience that requires a user to learn how to use Specific dynamic tags and they might need to reference our documentation to understand the syntax that we require to make these things work And I think that there's a lot of room for us to lean a little bit more heavily on the knowledge The user already has and use like existing paradigms as a and so to lessen the burden on the user Instead of like just creating something new that might be more elegant and sophisticated But still is just an additional thing for the user to learn in the same context I think there's just room for us to improve does that kind of help Angie? Do I have time for another question? Okay Last one. We're gonna Keep moving here. Thanks. My question has to do with which user you're talking about because some of us here may be Agencies and we build sites for clients who are also users So when you're speaking about the user experience and having to copy license keys and things like that Which might be second nature to those of us who have been doing it for a long time Are you talking about taking this to the level of say what Gutenberg is trying to do which is making it this more Accessible to clients that we serve Yes, absolutely. I'm talking about the the general user trying to just get something done on their own for their own Individual purposes that's absolutely what I'm talking about and while the the the tone in the theme really is around like product creators We could we could argue that like all of us are creating Experiences in some way if we're just creating websites if we're building them for our employer or for our clients or for building websites That other people do interact with we are creating Experiences that users interact with users maybe have a job to do have a mission to accomplish have something that they want And they are interacting with the creation of ours in order to come to accomplish that and the burden is on us to make it as Intuitive and simple as possible and the point of this discussion is the fact that we need to actively continue to Improve the usability over time because the bar gets The bar is a it moves. Anyway, you got it. All right. Thank you Kyle