@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 @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.
