SurveyResponses

Respondent Profile

people responded to my survey. They didn't all answer all the questions, but that's OK because frankly some of the questions were dumb.

The average respondent gives the site a score of 6.1/10, and visits zope.org 26 times a month. She rates her own zope ability to be 3.1 out of 5.

Unsurprisingly, most respondents are technically oriented. Many of them wear multiple hats at work, and several are in small start-ups.(RolesChart?)

More surprisingly (to me at least), it seems that the average respondent does not have much experience of other dynamic web development systems. There's plenty of client-side skills out there, plus a fair bit of non-web-specific skills like databases and web servers. However, there is very little PHP/ASP/JSP/J2EE/CF experience out there. (SkillsChart?)

My guess is that there are very many Windows users who never get past the newbie stage. This is simply because ~67% of downloads from zope.org are for the win32 version of zope, but most of the newbie respondents were *nix users. A common sight on the mailing lists is frustrated win32 users not being able to get zope to work out of the box. This is very much a subjective impression though.

Overall, I get the impression of a technically literate user, who has perhaps tried Zope but nothing else, and who has stuck with Zope because they like it. It's nearly impossible to tell how many have given up having tried it (though download statistics vs. guesses at actual deployments suggests quite a number). So I think we're looking at people who come to zope as first-time web developers. XXX I'd like to consider the implications of this a bit more.

First Impressions

There was a general consensus that the site does not do a very good job at helping developers, newbies or gurus, to do any development.

However, it seems that it does do a good job at attracting people to try Zope out in the first place. Respondents were generally initially impressed by the wealth of products and the size of the community.

Graphics / design

For many, graphics was not in important or interesting issue (about 15% didn't respond at all to this part of the survey). Of those who expressed an opinion, most people generally approved of the current design, though a common comment was that it is a bit dull, and should be more fun or lively.

On the plus side, people thought it was simple, quick, clean, fresh, and direct. On the minus side, it was ugly, slow, dull, cluttered, and boring. Boring was probably the most repeated negative description.

The main themes for the kinds of thing people would like visually were liveliness, and simplicity. Here are some of the adjectives used:

Fun, more colour, dynamic, snazzy, lively, friendly, simple, plain, fast to download, clear, lightweight, clean, modern, few graphics.

Sites people liked included:

http://www.zope.org/Resources/CaseStudies/index_html
http://www.mtv.de/home/index.php
http://www.tagesschau.de/
http://www.devshed.com/
http://zeldman.com/
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.freshmeat.net
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks
http://www.zopera.org/
http://www.postnuke.com/

Content

There were two types of feedback: the specific, and the general. On the specific side, the most commonly requested feature by far was a good search. People felt it was no use whatsoever in getting the right results. Many people used google instead.

Documentation was also a common request, though others praised the Book. It seems that it's the short, topic-centred type of documentation that is missing. HOWTOs?, FAQs?, glossaries ('What's Zope Zen?'), newbie docs, and code snippets are really in demand. Also common was the desire for show-and-tell demonstrations.

Very many people felt that the list was one of the community's greatest assets, and more should be made of it: lists of topics solved and unsolved, more link from the front page, etc.

Another request was for the products to be improved. Ideas included: bringing them further to the front, having ratings, obseleting inactive ones, etc. Several people liked the way products are member-centric.

There was a request for the multicultural / multilingual side of zope to be emphasised. Another person wanted screenshots of Zope for people to check out before they've downloaded it.

On the general front, I got a host of adjectives. The following summarises the most common themes:

Currently the site is unstructured, convoluted, dense, bureaucratic, mismashed, sprawling, unconnected, noisy; ugly, cluttered, ponderous, uncomfortable; static, stale, dead, inoperative.

People would like it to be comprehensive, informative, structured, searchable, easy to navigate, browseable, interconnected, accurate, complete, and concise.

My interpretation of this part of the feedback is that we need to put some serious consideration into a well-structured, clear and obvious information architecture.

A brief analysis of the current zope.org statistics suggests that the most visited parts of the current site are (in order of popularity):

Search
Products
Documentation
Tour
Download
Book
Resources