@kissane hits the nail on the head:
“I have a suspicion that a lot of the defensive maneuvering on Mastodon is happening because Mastodon fans know that the network absolutely cannot compete on user friendliness and basic social functionality”
@inthehands no references though. Also, I made a mastodon account on mastodon social while brushing my teeth. The only bit where the UX is hot garbage is when someone finds a toot outside their server and wants to interact with it. But by then retention happened, I think. Anyway, as @kissane said, we need to run iterations, experiments, collect reports from users. Otherwise it's just throwing opinions at each other, which is unhelpful.
@jonn
This is not “just throwing opinions at each other.” We already have voluminous input — actual user data — from people who’ve abandoned Masto either at the front door or on the first walk around the block, and said in very clear terms why they did. Yes, methodical data collection is better, but there’s plenty of anecdotal to get us started. And it’s surprisingly consistent. In particular…
@jonn
…onboarding frequently comes up as a pain point. So you brushed your teeth while doing it? Yay for you! It’s not a problem for you. But “it’s easy for me” is not a useful response to reports of usability friction, not ever.
I always tell my students that the first step of user testing is “shut the fuck up and watch.” That’s what Masto should have been doing since November.
@inthehands @jonn This, but the problem comes when you stop with what the user says the problem is.
Forty years of debugging user problems makes me absolutely certain: when a user says X is a problem, you're having a good day if X is really the problem. You need to drill down – for example by finding out exactly what they did. *Why* was that a problem for them?
This isn't possible with second hand anecdotes, of course.
@fishidwardrobe @jonn
Mmmm, I dunno, when somebody says “I got confused when I had to choose an instance and gave up” or “When I started posted, I got barraged with replies with racial slurs and photos of lynchings and the mods did nothing and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it”…I’m just going to say those anecdotes are actionable enough to start the iterative design process.
@inthehands @jonn That second one is hella actionable. But to really fix it you need to know how it happened. Has the offending user ever been reported? What did the mods do? Are the mods doing *anything*? If not, why not?
This is assuming we can fix this in code, or even help: some problems are just … people being shitty?
@fishidwardrobe @jonn
There are many problems that are not solvable in code, but are solvable in process. Moderation problems certainly are one.
In the cases in question (there were multiple!), yes, users were reported; no, mods did not deal with it.
Still, yes, you’re exactly right: somebody needs to follow up, do a “5 whys,” solve some solvable problems, and repeat. That willingness to investigate and •listen• is what’s been lacking.
@inthehands @fishidwardrobe oh my, this is real. Gladly, the path to mastodon seems to be through mastodon.social. Gladly, mastodon is not peertube, so instance largely doesn't matter as long as it's moderated. But yeah, filling in a dating profile to register is shit ux.
@inthehands @jonn Trivial recent example at work. User: "when I run this report it doesn't come turn up on the printer"¹
Actual problem: user was entering the wrong date range and the report printed a blank page.
¹Yes, I know, our IT is from the 80s. W genuinely use 132 column printers still! :(
@inthehands I followed the onboarding path of a person who doesn't use computers much: typed in "mastodon" in google, clicked 1st link, clicked sign up, entered info, checked my mail, activated my account, then in the web interface there was a big blue button "write" or something, I saw it immediately, clicked it and tooted. What are the anecdotal onboarding issues you mention? I'd be happy to help with them because this is the lowest hanging fruit in my book.
@jonn @inthehands here's an immediate one - did you join mastodon.social? for me it actually comes above joinmastodon in my Google results (and after some band). it's defederated a lot of places. why can't you find your friends, person who doesn't use computers much?
@tuzgai @inthehands joining mastodon.social and moving an account to another server is the best onboarding strategy. If you defed mastodon.social instead of having moderation, it's YOU who are locking in your users, not normal people who just want to join mastodon (no pun intended).
@jonn @inthehands it's only somewhat on either one, it's a systemic issue.
but let's say you join a server that's not defederated. now you have to know exactly who you're looking for and search for their handle+server. is this a good experience? I'm a tech person who deals with tedious computer stuff every day and still found it to be pretty obnoxious searching for everyone
@jonn @inthehands @kissane I’ve noticed that I’m running up against the “other server” UI issues more often now that I’m on a smaller instance. On a server with fewer federated posts, the lack of back filling is really noticeable, and I’m having to copy and paste URLs a lot more.
There’s also no mention of filtering. I’m desperate for more granular filtering, preferably per user, as well as to see who posted a collapsed, filtered post before expanding.
@jonn @MouseAT @kissane @inthehands The fact that federated posts dont backfill was baffling to me when first getting started with mastodon. Even something like Matrix (the federated chat platform) gets that part right, when you join a room it backfills the messages so you can see history. Why when i click a masto post or profile does it not request and backfill all the replies and etc so I dont have to shift context to see everything?
@jonn @inthehands It's true that actual user research needs to be done (who is going to fund that?) but equally, the developers need to demonstrate that they would welcome the results and take action on it (and who is going to fund that?).