Discussion: Observations from the WordPress Contributor Survey results

The first WordPress Contributor Survey was conducted in 2015 (here’s the announcement post), but the results were never published. In 2019, an identical survey was conducted, with the survey translated into five languages other than English! The purpose of this post is to invite contributors to share their observations when they review the results of both surveys, as well as to discuss how contributor teams might apply these observations to make their work more effective. 

The purpose of the survey is to help WordPress contributor leadership establish contributor experience baselines so that the organization can observe how things change over time. The survey includes questions about team involvement, recognition, and event involvement; there is also a section about demographics, which helps us identify how diverse our contributor base is. 

Here are the 2015 and 2019 survey results.  Here’s the report in PDF and PPT formats, as well.

Differences in distributing the two surveys

In 2015, the survey was conducted separately from the WordPress annual survey and only offered in English. 234 people responded to the survey. 

In 2019, this survey was offered at the end of the WordPress annual survey. The survey was available in 6 languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and German. 368 people responded to the survey. 

Of the respondents who took the main survey in 2019, 14% say they contribute to the open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. WordPress project. 6% opted to participate in the Contributor survey.

General observations on contributor behavior 

The majority of WordPress contributors are unpaid/self-sponsored volunteers. Overall, most contributors remain happy with their contributor experience, though the proportion of contributors who are happy with their experience shows a slight 2-point decrease from 2015 (from 85% to 83%).

Since 2015, there is a notable increase in the number of contributors who feel consistently recognized for their contributions. Recognition from peers is still reported to be more important to contributors than recognition from other teams or project leadership.

Most contributions are made whenever people have time, which is consistent with responses from 2015. The majority of contributors still average 0-2 hours in a given week, but many teams have seen increases in contributors who are able to offer substantially more time (15+).

Aside from participating online, 64% of Contributors say they were part of a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organizing team. Speaking at a local meetup (54%) and attending a local meeting (51%) are also common activities among contributors.

Demographic observations

  • 60% of contributors say they make a living from WordPress.
  • Locations among contributors responding to the survey have shifted significantly across the globe. Europe’s engagement with the survey increased significantly, from representing 37% of the responses collected in 2015 to 46% in 2019. North America responses significantly decreased from 46% to 6% for this survey.  
  • Nearly half (47%) of the contributors say they are White/Caucasian, while 16% prefer not to answer the survey question about ethnicity.
  • The vast majority (80%) within the contributor community identify as male.
  • Nearly three-quarters (74%) of contributors say they are heterosexual/straight, and 12% prefer not to share their sexual orientation.
  • 39% of contributors are 30-39 years of age, while nearly one-quarter (24%) are aged 40-49. Less than one-quarter (23%) are under the age of 30.

Feedback and discussion! 

Thank you to all the contributors who have shared their feedback on the survey so far! I’ve been told that the questions about military service and political views (at least on a spectrum of liberal-conservative) aren’t meaningful to contributors in many parts of the world and appear US-centric. If there are any other questions that you think should be added or removed, please feel free to share them in a comment on this post. 

Apart from feedback about the survey itself, I’d also like to invite contributors to discuss the results that they found interesting and meaningful. Here are some questions to help frame that discussion:

  • Did any results surprise or disappoint you?
  • Does this demographic information match your observations? 
  • Are teams set up to welcome contributors with 0-2 hours per week, as well as contributors with 15+ hours to work? 

Please leave your thoughts on a comment on this post! 

#survey, #user-developer-survey

WordPress User/Pro Survey: 11 questions and a script

I recently had the humbling realization that calling this survey the “User and Developer Survey”… ignores a host of other roles in the WordPress ecosystem, as if we don’t care to gather data from designers, content creators, support professionals, translators, and project managers (to name a few). Because that’s not true, I’m going to start calling this the “WordPress User/Pro Survey” when discussing with contributors. For the general public, I think we should just call it the “WordPress Survey.”

The WordPress User/Pro Survey needs your help! In this post, you will find 11 questions excerpted from the survey that need feedback, plus a link to the entire survey script. The full survey script is very long, and many questions from previous surveys are included, so this post includes only the 11 questions that I think are more likely to be affected by blind spots.

As you read through these questions, please note any thoughts you have about answer options that should be added or removed. If you don’t know how you would answer a particular question, I’d love to hear about it in a comment on this post. I’ll also request feedback on an optional question about gender, which I will elaborate on below. 

Questions that have stars (*) next to them are required questions (in the survey, not for this post!). Click “Show full post” to see the questions and the specific feedback requests.

Continue reading

#survey, #user-developer-survey

WordPress User/Developer Survey: clarifying goals

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on the previous post about updating the WordPress User & Developer Survey! Commenters shared lots of ideas as well as some wise words about survey design and data collection. There are plenty of questions we could ask, and it became clear to me immediately that the best way to move forward would be to clarify the goals of the survey. Once we’re settled on what we’d like to learn, we can use those goals to direct and inform the questions we ask.

Clarifying goals

The goal of this survey is to learn more about who uses WordPress, and how they use it — data that we can’t gather anywhere else — so we can build better software. Here is an outline detailing sections of questions, with some thoughts on what contributor teams would find each section useful:

  1. Who are the people currently using WordPress? (all teams)
  2. How do people find WordPress, and why do they decide to use it? (marketing, community, design, accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility))
  3. What do people want to accomplish when they use WordPress? (coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., design, accessibility, training)
  4. What do people find difficult when using WordPress? (support, docs, training, community, core, design, accessibility)
  5. What tools would make people happier when using WordPress? (themes, plugins, core, design/a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), support)
  6. How do people extend or customize WordPress? (plugins, themes, design/a11y)

Once people answer questions in the above categories, we can offer an additional set of questions designed for WordPress contributors, past and present. Presumably a contributor will be willing to give a little extra time to the survey, since they have a closer relationship with WordPress than non-contributors. We could probably use the list of questions asked in the 2015 Contributor Experience Survey as a starting point; it seems like a pretty comprehensive start.

Early request for help in promoting the survey

Mentioning this now so that marketers can plan ahead: this year I’d like to promote the survey more widely than we have in the past.

We’ve always promoted the survey through a banner on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, plus an article on WordPress News and through word of mouth. This has been successful in the past, but less so in recent years. In 2015*, 45,997 people filled out the survey, but in 2016 and 2017, less than 10,000 responses came in. We won’t have time to add a notice to everyone’s dashboard (even if everyone agreed that would be wise), so this year I’d like to ask everyone to help promote the survey through as many channels as they have available to them.

Here are some ways you can help:

  1. Promote the survey in your or your company’s newsletter.
  2. Write a blog post about the survey.
  3. Mention it on social media.
  4. Encourage people at your local WordPress meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. to take the survey. (Heck, organize a take-the-survey event, and then discuss the questions afterwards! Easy meetup idea!) 
  5. Mention the survey to the audience of your podcast.
  6. Remind people who attend the meetings of your contributor team to take the survey.

Next Steps

Based on feedback on the broad goals of the survey, I’ll work up a survey draft, incorporating questions we asked in past surveys as well as new questions, which I’ll then publish on this site for additional feedback.

Request for feedback

  1. Do the sections above seem reasonable (if the goal is to get an idea of who uses WordPress and how they use it)?
    1. If so, is there any particular item on this list that would help your contributor team make more strategic decisions in 2020? 
    2. If not, what would be the most useful thing for your team to know about who and how people are using WordPress?
  2. Do you have any other suggestions for ways people can promote this survey?

* There were 27,662,162 active WordPress installations as of Dec 24, 2015.

#user-developer-survey

Updates to the WordPress User & Developer Survey

For many years, information on how people use WordPress has been gathered through an annual survey published on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. In the early years of WordPress, interesting results were shared at the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/.. In 2017, I shared results from 2015-2017 surveys in a post on the News blog. There was no survey in 2018.

In preparation for the 2019 survey, I’d like to collect topic suggestions from WordPress contributor teams. Ideally, the questions can be updated to gather information that will help inform contributor work in the coming year.

A few important notes:

  1. This survey is mostly publicized through WordPress.org, which affects the base of respondents.
  2. A full export of the raw data will not be published, to avoid sharing information that might reveal something that respondents consider private. (I’d love to make this information as accessible as possible, though, so if you have a suggestion for an OS project or tool that would allow people to access with the data, but that still protects individual response privacy, please leave a comment on this post!)
  3. Long surveys generally gather fewer responses. It might not be possible to include questions on every suggested topic.

Suggest a topic!

WordPress contributor teams, what information would help you prioritize or direct your work in 2020? Suggest some survey topics in a comment on this post!

#survey, #user-developer-survey