MaaS: MDN as a Startup

tl;dr – I want to reboot MDN as a Lean Startup – a platform for web developer knowledge and community. There's a bunch of new kinds of work to do. Go to the MDN Metrics project proposal on wiki.moz, join the thread on mdn-drivers, or comment here to give feedback.

After I read Kanban and The Phoenix Project I picked up Lean Startup and Lean Analytics. I love that the Lean Startup community is inclusive of intrapreneurhsip – people making new products inside larger host companies. The “Developer Program” we've discussed at Mozilla is a perfect example of intrapreneurship, and we should treat it as a User-Generated Content startup.

We're already doing this ...

We're redesigning MDN and already launched the redesign to beta testers. It looks great - it highlights important content, improves search and discover-ability, and it's easier to read article text. We're improving the redesign with quick continuous deployments to beta users; we even pushed to production 4 times during Mozilla Summit - 2 of which were changes made by new contributors from our impromptu MDN hack night!

But ...

We need to measure

It's no secret that the redesign project has been stressful across all teams - Product, UX, Creative, Development, Content, and our community. Pressure can be healthy - constraints foster creativity, innovation, and some pretty epic hacks. But pressure without purpose is just wasteful stress. And the driving philosophy of Lean is to eliminate inefficient and wasteful activity.

Dan McKinley from Etsy gave a very insightful talk about Designing for Continuous Experimentation at Warmgun design conference. He tells the story of Etsy implementing an infinite scroll project:

So when we decided to do this we just went for it. We designed and built the feature, and then we figured we'd release it and it'd be great.

...

Eventually we came to terms with the fact that infinite scroll had made the product worse, and we had changed too many things in the process to have any clue which was the culprit.

...

So if we go back to our "product plan," we see a couple of major things wrong with it. We did a lot of work and it was pointless. A better way to have done this would have been to validate those premises ahead of time and then make the call.

(Emphasis mine) So, I'm pushing hard for MDN to validate premises before we expend time, effort, and stress on projects.

What should we measure?

MDN is site for user-generated content like Wikipedia, reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Lean Analytics has an entire chapter devoted to UGC metrics for:

  • Visitor Engagement - how often do our readers come back, and how long do they stay?
  • Engagement Funnel and Changes - how many users register; how deeply are they involved with MDN and how do we encourage them to deeper activities?
  • Notification Effectiveness - how many newsletter subscribers and twitter followers do we have? How many of them open the email or click thru to the links?
  • Content Creation and Interaction - how many people tag, edit, translate, or review articles; how many comment or create demos?
  • Value of Created Content - how visitors read certain topics and articles; which traffic sources bring more engaged users?
  • Content Sharing & Virality - how many users tweet, like, or otherwise share articles; how do the recipients behave as a result?

For example, I've been digging into our MDN Engagement Conversion Funnel:

MDN Engagement ChartFor me, the engagement cliff between visiting and creating an account is too huge. So that measurement tells me we should add more activity features between visiting and creating an account. Maybe something like:

MDN Potential Engagement Chart

If we add features, we should implement minimum viable features to validate our assumptions about the impact we want - e.g., does a sharing or voting feature actually increase account registrations and editing behavior?  So we'll also want to define "the impact we want" - higher quality content, more visitors, etc.

How should we measure?

So far I've done all this by hand, but I'm proposing that we start a project for MDN Metrics on the site itself. Something similar to the interface of SUMO's KPI dashboards, though our KPI's will be different. That way everyone in the MDN community has the access to our metrics when discussing MDN product and priorities. If you've read this far and want to give feedback, leave comments here, or join the thread on mdn-drivers.

team fortress 2 enable steam community ingame

Another quick google-search-turned-post to help others looking for a solution to this problem.

After my last Steam upgrade (Mac client) the community overlay stopped working in Team Fortress 2. This breaks a number of features, including the "Invite" button when creating a party. This is the solution that worked for me:

1. In Steam Library, right-click Team Fortress 2 and choose Properties
2. UN-CHECK "Enable Steam Community In-Game"
3. Quit Steam
4. Re-open Steam
5. RE-CHECK "Enable Steam Community In-Game"

Overlay starts working again!

HTML5 App Stores don't go too far enough

tl;dr - HTML5 app stores don't leverage the web as much as we should.

Futurama Political Debate

 I'm convinced that packaging HTML5 apps for stores is emulating failure. There are lots of reactions. Among the comments here, Les made the opposite assertion of mine - "where app stores win over plain old URLs is discoverability. ... URLs are precise, but they’re sharp and pokey for most people to handle."

HTML5 App search engine > Pokey URLs

Les made his own counter-point that we fixed pokey URL's with search engines. So, do we need "a special case search engine where the results are constrained [to HTML5 apps]"?

Maybe.

The "webby" approach is to crawl the web to build an index of all app manifests. But how can we discover the manifests? None of the HTML5 app stores document a way to hyperlink manifests.

But maybe we can use schema.org SoftwareApplication type, with its convenient installUrl property. We can even use the WebApplication sub-type's 'browserRequirements' property to designate a Firefox, Chrome, or W3C manifest. So Incredible Pizza could expose their HTML5 app like so:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebApplication">
  <a itemprop="installUrl" href="http://app.incrediblepizza.com/incrediblepizza.webapp"><span itemprop="name">Incredible Pizza</span> for <span itemprop="browserRequirements">Firefox</span></a>
  <a itemprop="installUrl" href="http://app.incrediblepizza.com/incrediblepizza.crx"><span itemprop="name">Incredible Pizza</span> for <span itemprop="browserRequirements">Chrome</span></a>
  <a itemprop="installUrl" href="http://app.incrediblepizza.com/incrediblepizza.wgt"><span itemprop="name">Incredible Pizza</span> for <span itemprop="browserRequirements">Opera, Windows Phone</span></a>
</div>

Voilà. We have web technology to make an HTML5 App search engine. But why are HTML5 app stores making developers manually submit manifest URLs to directories when we could leverage hyperlinks - the central nervous system of the web? As a bonus, a hyperlink-fueled HTML5 app search engine is complimentary to existing mobile platforms. This could be nice:

iOS App Search mockup

Apps contextualize content

Still, an HTML5 app search engine doesn't leverage the web as much as we could. Ambrose Little suggests "discoverability is worse [on the web] because it’s not just apps, it is all kinds of content, much of which is not pertinent nor optimized for your device." This gets to the crux of the issue: outside of pure experience apps like games, when we say we want apps, what we really want is relevant, contextual, optimized content on our mobile devices. Can we deliver relevant, contextual, optimized content to mobile devices without apps?

In Programming the Mobile Web, Maximiliano Firtman touches on this in his chapter about geolocation:

One of the great features of mobile devices is that they can go everywhere with us. That is why the where is very important context to be considered by our websites. Knowing the user's location can help us to show useful contextual information -Firtman

Geolocation is a great place to start, since it's so widely supported on existing mobile browsers. I suggested that incrediblepizza.com could return location-specific content using a captive wifi portal or geolocation. But fuzzy search can also deliver location-specific content, as Google Maps does; though it could be improved to deep-link into a domains' pages with something like GeoURL or a geofenced sitemap.

I.e., if incrediblepizza.com added:

<meta name="geo.position" content="36.05877;-95.8831" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="36.05877, -95.8831" />

to their Tulsa store location page, and maybe add a geo point and radius to their sitemap:

<url xmlns:geo="http://geositemaps.org">
   <loc>http://www.incrediblepizza.com/locations/tulsa</loc>
   <lastmod>2013-01-01</lastmod>
   <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
   <priority>0.8</priority>
   <geo-radius>36.05877;-95.8831;30</geo-radius>
</url>

mobile search could do something like this:

iOS Search for Pizza

Search already works

We can search for a pizza place nearby. So what? Foursquare already does that.

But do we have to search for it? As predicted by Mike Masnick back during Yahoo's misguided deal with Microsoft in 2009, "People are discovering that information finds them, rather than them going in search of information. Search already works. The next interesting challenge is in improving the way information finds you, rather than the way you find information."

Improving the way information finds you is how social competes with search, and it's the way mobile web should compete with app stores. Location, time, personal information, preferences, friends, actions - all of these create the context in which information should find us. Chris Cox from Facebook summed it up:

[Mobile phones] should be contextually aware. Check-in to flights, find deals at grocery stores, etc. These things take a bunch of clicks now — it’s all wasting time. The phone should know what we want.

My phone should know:

  1. I have 2 kids under the age of 4
  2. We're near south Tulsa
  3. We typically eat out on Tuesday nights
  4. It's almost dinner-time

It should query the web. To which incrediblepizza.com replies:

  1. Kids 3 and under eat free
  2. We're located in south Tulsa
  3. We have double-play-points specials on Tuesdays

incrediblepizza.com and my phone inform me automatically. This touches semantic web stuff; and maybe that's something we mobile web developers should be touching. Because ...

The only group who can contextualize everything is everyone

The web will obsolete app stores ... again. In Scott Jenson's "Why Mobile Apps Must Die" talk at BDConf 2011, he longs for a web-based phone, and a discovery service that helps us find the right needles in the needle-stack of connected things. He calls it "a baby step towards this idea of doing just-in-time interaction" and says "I can guarantee you this will not happen thru apps."

Why not?

Christian reminds us of Yahoo's first (failed) attempt at re-creating a categorized directory of the web. If you don't have time to read Clay Shirky's classic perspective on ontology at least watch this great related 5-minute video:

Even if you skipped both, here's the crux of the matter (emphasis mine):

Yahoo ... added the shelf back. ... The charitable explanation for this is that they thought of this ... as their job, and as something their users would value. The uncharitable explanation is that they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system. Both of those explanations may have been true at different times and in different measures, but the effect was to override the users' sense of where things ought to be, and to insist on the Yahoo view instead.

You can replace "Yahoo" with "Apple" in the preceding statement and it mirrors the current situation of Apps. The web out-grew Yahoo's shelf; it will out-grow Apple's, Google's, Microsoft's, and Mozilla's shelves. Our sense of where things ought to be and how things ought to find us is better than any vendor's. "The web is going to win again. The web always wins." as Johnath says.

The web will win sooner if we spend less time on the shelves and more time delivering relevant, contextual, optimized content to mobile devices.

Packaged HTML5 Apps: Are we emulating failure?

tl;dr - URLs delivered a better experience than native desktop apps; they can do the same for mobile apps.

update: see my follow-up post - HTML5 App Stores don't go too far enough.

HTML5 in a box

When we discussed Sencha's Fastbook app on the mozilla.engagement.developers list Robert pointed out that Sencha compared their HTML5 app running in mobile web browser to Facebook's HTML5 app running in an iOS WebView - the way Sencha & PhoneGap packaged HTML5 apps actually run. It's widely discussed, as we did with Fastbook, that HTML5 apps perform worse in iOS UIWebView than iOS Safari. There are similar stories about Android WebView performance, and Tulsa Web Dev and HTML5 PhoneGap developer Rod just posted a similar performance-related anecdote about BlackBerry WebWorks.

That made me think, "PhoneGap is just that - a stop-gap." ... "we should drop this whole PhoneGap App nonsense and go (back) to mobile web at simple URL's" since:

  1. App discover-ability & installation sucks
  2. App content discover-ability sucks

App discover-ability & installation sucks

A couple months ago, my wife and I took our daughters to Incredible Pizza. When we sat down, I saw this table-tent:

Incredible Pizza Table-Tent

I spent a couple minutes trying to make this "check-in" UX work on my wife's phone. The table-tent literally reads: "TIP: A QR-Reader App is necessary to scan QR codes. There are several free ones available. Check your app store." So, here's what I did to find an app:

  1. Connect to Incredible Pizza wifi
  2. Tap "All apps"
  3. Swipe down to "Play Store"
  4. Tap "Play Store"
  5. Tap "Search"
  6. Type "qr reader"
  7. Swipe thru a huge list of apps
  8. Pick one at random (*)
  9. Tap "Install"
  10. Tap "Accept & Download"
  11. Wait for download & install

Android prompts me with a wall of permissions that I have to accept in order to install the app. And because app updates with new permissions can't be automatically downloaded & installed, many app developers just make their app request all permissions.

* Especially interesting to developers - I picked a free qr reader app at random, verifying that App Stores are more like casinos than gold-mines.

Content discover-ability sucks

Once I had the QR reader app, I started to use it to check-in to Incredible Pizza on Facebook:

  1. Hold the phone in front of the card
  2. Tap "Visit Link"
  3. Tap "Browser"
  4. Go thru 5 redirects to a prompt to open native Facebook app
  5. Facebook opens
  6. Wonder: "Why am I trying to do this in the first place?"

There was no human-readable URL on the card. I had to choose between "Browser" and "VZ Navigator" that came with the phone from Verizon. The redirects took about 20 seconds. Finally, since they don't deep link into the native app, I ultimately end up just staring at the Facebook app as if I'd opened it myself - nothing there at all about Incredible Pizza.

This totally obscures the app's content, and value, from the user. If I package my HTML5 app with PhoneGap I have to also register a custom URL scheme to link to a specific part of it - something PhoneGap doesn't help you to do(?). And even when you do it, you will need to make and deploy an update to the app anytime you want to add new URL-driven logic to it, invoking another round of app review.

The Plain Old URL approach

Contrast the above experience with a more traditional web approach:

  1. Connect to Incredible Pizza wifi
  2. Tap Browser
  3. (Maybe) Type "incrediblepizza.com"
  4. (Maybe) Tap "Yes" at a geolocation prompt

Incredible Pizza could immediately give me the store-specific web page via captive wifi portal with big buttons for location-and-date-specific coupons, facebook check-in, etc. Or, if I'm not on their wifi, I type "incrediblepizza.com" to get the same thing via geolocation. In addition to a simpler experience, deploying new or updated content is as simple as updating the website.

So why package HTML5 apps?

Considering all the above, I usually ask web devs using PhoneGap: "Why are you using PhoneGap instead of just putting an HTML5 app at a URL?" and they often reply "everyone wants an app." This "everyone wants an app" situation is a problem we developers and designers should address - but not just technically. We should work with our clients and customers to consider the full user experience of native vs. web - especially app installation & content discover-ability.

... although many brands and creative agencies believe that they need to develop iPhone apps, what they need in reality is a good mobile site. It costs less to develop, manage and work across all handsets.

- HTML5 - The End of Apps | Mobile Europe

If you're making an HTML5 app, consider - do you want to make a native desktop application? Why or why not? Then consider if the same reasoning is true for the native mobile application. Consider the URL experience for your customers. Walk your clients thru both native app and URL experiences on mobile devices. We used web URLs to deliver a better experience than native desktop apps - we should do the same with mobile apps.

Good HTML5 Packaging - URL Bookmarks

Vendors like Mozilla (disclaimer: my employer) and Google are also working on manifests to install HTML5 apps on Firefox (OS) and Chrome (OS). Opera and previously(?) Microsoft (via Silverlight) use the W3C Packaged Web Apps (Widgets) standard. I like these efforts if they contribute towards a consistent "installation" experience that works more like an enhanced bookmark. I.e., turn this:

  1. Visit URL
  2. Tap "Add to ..."
  3. Tap "Add to Home Screen"
  4. Tap "Add"

into this:

  1. Visit URL
  2. Tap "Add to Home Screen."

But next time you make an app, consider the tried-and-true web experience:

  1. Tap Browser
  2. Type URL

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