sarah semark 6:08 pm on February 7, 2019
Tags: gutenberg ( 21 ), research ( 19 )

Learning about site builders (Site building study #4)

These are the results of a user research study investigating mental models related to building and customising a website. Results are split across five posts:

Background | Segments: Bloggers · Small Businesses · Site Builders | Conclusions

The research group sorted participants into three segments, based on their current understanding of how people use WordPress. These segments are based on a handful of data points and warrant further study to confirm the categories. For now, these segments allow researchers to group WordPress’ extensive userbase into behavioural categories and learn characteristics specific to each group.

For this study, we focussed on three segments: bloggers, small businesses, and site builders (people who build sites for others). Today we’re going to learn more about site builders.

Site builders are people who make sites for others. Site builders often start as bloggers or small businesses. Having taught themselves to build websites, they are now progressively leveraging their skills to earn additional income. They tend to work for friends, acquaintances, or people in their professional networks and often barter or don’t charge much for the websites they build.

Time-crunched

Site builders have busy lives. They often juggle a full-time job with family commitments and build websites on the side. They struggle to find time to keep up with technological change. They tend to work whenever they can: during their commute, after they get home, or while their children are still at school.

Technical skills

While they can be quite technical, time limitations mean that site builders avoid using code as much as possible and look for the most efficient solutions. This manifests in different ways. They use child themes but configure them using a third-party pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. They write CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. or PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. code but tend to do it directly via the WordPress admin.

I could build a CMS myself, but then maintaining that would be a full-time job.

Self-taught

Site builders are typically self-taught and price-conscious. They tend to prefer free products. They tend toward experimentation—they download something, see if it works, and learn by doing. They prefer to figure things out themselves. They learn new skills as and when they need them.

I want my clients to have as much control over their website as possible.

They take pride in constructing sites and take an active role in educating their clients. They are responsible for ongoing website maintenance. They often work for a small business.

All-in-one themes

I know these settings like the back of my hand because I’ve been using them for ten years.

Site builders have very defined ways of going about building a site and are quite resistant to change. Many of them use a multipurpose, all-in-one theme with many options or a page builder plugin to build their sites. They’ve invested their time in learning the ins and outs of the plugin or theme and they use it repeatedly on every site they build. Learning a new approach or paradigm is a big investment for them, and they need to be sold on the value of that investment.

If it wasn’t broke, why are we fixing it?

For site builders, the critical part of the site building process is the beginning. By contrast, small businesses and bloggers tend to do more ongoing work on a single site and spend more of their time working on the site after the initial setup process.

Goals

To support themselves by making sites for others
To build a website as quickly as possible
To ensure client sites are stable

Pain points

Lack of time
Trouble keeping pace with technology
Site maintenance can be difficult—updates and backups are a source of stress

Typical site building journey

Plan site, build site, launch site, maintain site.

Opportunities

Help site builders sell their clients on the value of WordPress.
When introducing coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. changes, communicate the value of learning a new paradigm.
Separate themes into visual styles and templates for increased flexibility and customisability.
Implement reusable snippets that can be reused across sites.
Provide shareable resources to educate & sell clients on WordPress.
Upgrades should be controllable and reversible.

#gutenberg #research

Joy 6:44 pm on February 7, 2019

I myself am in this categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging., and I don’t see how “Separate themes into visual styles and templates for increased flexibility and customisability.” applies at all.

The thing that you missed is some way for the client to know what can be changed and what shouldn’t be touched. Either fine-grained capabilities or a way to leave little notes on things explaining why it is there. The best place for this would be the plugins page, but there are often theme things, widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. things, menu things, and home page things that are interrelated and explanation could help the client make updates or help the developer remember what was done on this site.
Basically, memory-joggers or just plain communication between the maintainers of a site, in the admin of the site.
- Mark Uraine 3:36 am on February 8, 2019
  
  The thing that you missed is some way for the client to know what can be changed and what shouldn’t be touched.
  
  I don’t think Sarah “missed” this, but maybe it just wasn’t an obvious stress point shared by the individuals that were interviewed. In fact, as Sarah noted, one individual is quoted saying, “I want my clients to have as much control over their site as possible.”
  
  This doesn’t discount your concern, Joy, which is valid. I’ve heard it come up a number of times in ways that user-roles can’t quite solve. I just don’t think it was necessarily “missed” on anyone’s part.
- sarah semark 12:38 pm on February 8, 2019
  
  One of the interesting things about user research like this is that you’ll always get some divergence—what works for one individual won’t always work for another. What we’re trying to do is to look for patterns so that we’re able to generalise about behaviours across a group, and build tools that will work for the majority of that group. There will inevitably be generalisations that don’t apply to all members of the group, or areas where the needs will diverge. One thing we’re trying hard to avoid is basing our recommendations on a single data point since these won’t always reflect a majority need.
  
  We only spoke with five different site builders for this study, and there are parts of each’s individual experience that we didn’t end up discussing. There is some amount of bias introduced when the data is recorded, and then again when the data is processed, which is then magnified by the fact that we had a small group processing, sorting, and parsing that data for meaning.
  
  In short: we probably missed lots of things! I think I mentioned this in the introductory post as well, but this isn’t intended to be an exhaustive “this is everything you need to know” about WordPress users, more a starting point for further research and discussion.
  
  One thing that did come up, as @mapk mentioned, is client control and maintenance. We noticed a divergence here: one person wanted to offer their clients as much control as possible, and another wanted to limit access to only the bare necessities. It seems like this may be an area that warrants further study to really understand the pain points users experience before diving into a solution. Thanks for your input here!
  
  If you’re curious to learn more, we’ve made the (processed) data available in a database, and we can also share the raw data with you. (It’s not public because it involves some private user data, but just pop into #research and we’ll get you set up!) You can look through the data yourself, or you could run a follow-up study to investigate these results further and gain more insights. Again, we’d be delighted to help facilitate. 🙂
reid.peifer 12:11 pm on February 8, 2019

“The research group sorted participants into three segments, based on their current understanding of how people use WordPress. These segments are based on a handful of data points and warrant further study to confirm the categories. ”

Is there a different space where these audience segments are being discussed? I’d love to read more about that process and how it fits into the larger process.
- sarah semark 4:11 pm on February 9, 2019
  
  We didn’t use any formal segmentation method—these segments are largely based on how participants used their websites, and there was some cross-over between the three segments or people who belonged to two segments to some degree.
  
  If I recall correctly, the segmentation happened somewhere in the middle of the interview sessions, and it was largely based on what I personally thought was a natural grouping based on broad behaviours. So basically: it’s pretty impromptu and unscientific, and might not be the best way to group the incredibly broad range of different WordPress users! (There are also definitely groups we didn’t talk to in this study, like big publishers, agencies, community members, etc.)
  
  As more research happens, it’s probably worth having a larger discussion about how to segment WordPress users. This would help us establish a clear picture of exactly who uses WordPress, so we can then learn more about their needs and goals. If this is something you’d be interested in working on or discussing further, the #research channel in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. would be a good place for initial ideas, and then we could bring it back to make/design for more in-depth discussion. 🙂
williampatton 12:50 am on February 9, 2019

With the buckets of users chosen I probably fall into the ‘Site Builder’ bucket but the generalisations here do not apply to myself or my use of WordPress.

I am not opposed to the idea of themes becoming separated into ‘styles’ and ‘templates’ but I know from experience that splitting the 2 things into unique parts of the overall theme system has problems that are not easily overcome.

The existing WordPress theme system is a template engine by nature, bearing that in mind it’s probably better to strip the ‘style’ parts from a theme so that it then becomes only the ‘templates’ which are better suited than styles and scripts to be parsed by the existing system.

If the theme becomes the ‘templates’ then that leaves a problem of where best to add in the ‘style’ part of a theme. I really think the best place to add styles is directly in the theme. To me both are interlinked in such a way that they are not detachable and this brings us full circle back to where a theme is a combination of both layout templates and the styles again.

Detaching layouts and styles would require a major rework to the existing templates system and to retain backwards compatibility with the thousands of themes we have hosted in the directory as well as the hundreds of thousands of custom themes out there would be a pretty big challenge for whoever was undertaking it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack 3:04 pm on February 9, 2019

Big Thank You to the research team! This series is very helpful not only for those building GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ Phase 2.
All WordPress product designers (pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party and themes developers) gain deeper knowledge about the site building journey.
Reading through some of the pain points in this post, I also now realize the ramification of the Gutenberg release on freelance site builders, who have a preferred method and process, that got slightly disrupted.

They struggle to find time to keep up with technological change.