Designing for Devs

Understanding developers, their values, motivations and goals through user research

We’d been talking about involving the developer community in Questbook’s brand design for a couple of weeks then. But what was the obvious start? It wasn’t like we could just tweet out that we needed to talk to developers.

Between October and November 2021, we spoke to 16 developers. A couple of them were familiar with the Questbook community, but most of them responded simply out of curiosity.

In these interviews, we tried gleaning not only who they were and where they came from; but what motivated them, what excited them, where they got started and what they might need from a developer community like Questbook.

Here are some insights from the conversations, and what we learnt:

🏫 Background

• Most developers learn code and take to development quite early in their lives as teenagers, usually through school or encouraging teachers.
• They had access to computers in their homes from an early age; but that wasn’t common amongst their peers.
• However, computer science education (especially, in India) is severely outdated. The tech and concepts that are still being taught, like HTML and PHP are years old.
• Developers’ interest in programming and building software is largely self-initiated and self-motivated.
• They describe learning programming as ‘addictive’.
• They have a genuine curiosity for learning how software is made and how it works, solving problems, hacking together solutions and for discovering ‘What’s out there’.
• They enjoy the thrill of building something that will be used by other people, all over the world.
• There are lots of opportunities in tech, and since technology is everywhere, it creates the most impact.

“As someone from a tier 2 city, it’s created a lot of opportunities for me (via platforms like Twitter, etc)”

🧠 Culture

• Developers have to keep learning and updating their knowledge because the nature of software and technology is such that it constantly evolves.

“If you have to learn, you have to keep doing more things. You’re unlikely to learn everything from your full-time job”

• Developers actively consume content and become aware of trends from Twitter, via newsletters and blogs.
• Many young developers see content curation and creation as a means to learn more effectively.

“If I curate, I can grasp more. And if I can share that with others, it’ll be helpful”

• Learning a new programming language is most like learning a new language.

“What I learn depends on what I want to make”

• ‘Learning by building’ is the most effective way that developers learn new skills and technologies.
• By reading documentation, coding along, asking and learning through forums and communities.
• Videos are not very effective as a medium to learn code.

“Seeing videos doesn’t help. You see and then forget. Topics seem clear when you watch but hard to recall when doing”

• For developers, having breadth of knowledge is an added advantage, but depth is more valuable.

🪐 Community

What makes for a good community:

• Thoughtful, smooth onboarding that doesn’t feel overwhelming for new members.
• Active moderation (centralisation) by community managers or admins to maintain coherence, for new and old members, and to prevent spamming.

“Web3 projects and communities can’t be totally decentralised; needs regulation otherwise there’ll be total chaos”

“There needs to be centralised authority in the form of a core community and voting power with the broader community”

• Incentives (implicit or explicit) that reward being genuinely helpful and kind to others in the community who are learning or asking questions
• Encouragement and celebration of community members’ wins (including but not limited to projects, learning milestones, contributions, etc.), even at the cost of some members potentially self-promoting or shilling their work

“It’s important to feel like I own a piece of project. If credit is given I would feel loyal to a project or community”

• Culture of ‘show and tell’ to encourage members to present and show-off what they’re building to their peers. Members can share feedback or collaborate with project owners.
• Good humour and a culture of creating, sharing and enjoying memes.

“Currently, communities effectively express a certain vibe that they’re able to capitalise on”

• Align members to its values and convictions, communicated clearly and consistently.
• Showcase for members who’ve ‘made it big’ with avenues to give back to the community that helped them get started.

“I’d be loyal to a community that has helped in grow personally”

📚 Open-source

• The motivation to work on open-source projects is if the topic is interesting.

“It’s not as much about giving back, but more about using the project to learn and play”

• Developers earn a lot of visibility and credibility if their open-source project gains traction.
• Open-source is exciting for developers because of the ability to build on top and/or fork other developers’ projects.
• It’s difficult to participate in open-source projects without a community. Navigating through documentation can be challenging.

🌞 Web3

There are broadly two kinds of developers who are learning to build for web3:

• Believers

“If you ask me, the future is web3”

“There’s no need for me to be learning and spending hours after my work learning web3, but I’m doing it purely out of interest in the technology”

• Opportunists

“It’s more about the opportunity in web3 rather than the tech to move full-time. I have a friend working full-time in web3, but he’s still earning less than me”

• Many developers believe in the future of web3 because the people they consider smart and credible believe in it and are moving towards web3.
• The web3 community and founders are extremely approachable and helpful. It’s unfathomable to be able to similarly interact with web2 founders.
• The ‘skin in the game’ nature of web3 rewards higher quality and fewer trolls.

The top reasons developers are attracted to blockchain technology and building in web3:

• Built-in incentive structure with skin in the game.

“There’s a new dimension to coding in web3. What we build can create value directly to and help the person who is contributing the most”

• Everything is open-source by design, while still maintaining privacy.
• Decentralisation.

“If you have the power to manipulate, you will. This is not possible with blockchain.”

• Web3 is about one ↔ one interactions. The affinity is towards the people in the community, rather than the project itself. eg. BAYC, versus web2, where it’s more a company ↔ individual consumer connection. eg. Apple.
• In web3, there is a sense that since it’s all very new, we’re all learning this new technology together. So, there’s lot of sharing and mutual support.

“I think web2 didn’t allow nice people to be that nice. Someone says something about Facebook and gets thrown out”

“The space is early. There’s no guru. People make rules that Javascript should be like this. Here, a lot of people don’t know what’s happening”

“I don’t have that much experience, I’m still learning but happy to help others learn”

• Crypto and web3 as a technology will fade away if people are attached and limited just to the currency aspect.

Designing for web3 is different, much like it is expected to be for any technology or paradigm. But working in a space that by design rewards sharing knowledge and building on top of what others have created; it’s exciting, it’s confusing, it’s leaving us a little adrift.

That’s where you come in. The understanding and empathy that these interviews have given us is invaluable. But we’ve got a long way to go to channel these insights into creating the actual brand platform for Questbook.

Stay tuned.