| I think developers are missing the testing practices UX designers have grown accustomed to: 1. Usability tests where developers literally sit down and watch someone install and use your library from scratch (I find a lot of developers do not like to do this). Things like, seeing where they have to look up documentation (and how they do it), what bugs they hit, and how often they make common mistakes. I think a lot of this could be logged e.g. A developer signs up, you have their email + API key, you can connect the dots between what doc pages they view, how often, and what errors they commonly run into. 2. Doing whatever it takes to minimize the time to aha moment. This is absolutely critical for any product design effort, but not many companies measure this if any at all when it comes to DX. I think Twilio and maybe Stripe are the only ones that may have had this as a key onboarding KPI. Ultimately I think a majority of developers that are capable of implementing these things are quite technical and used to the general state of DX so they don't view bad DX as much of an issue unless its really terrible. Lastly, I really wish error messages would just be super informative. For example getting something like this "undefined method `my_method_name' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)" still feels a bit cryptic to someone newer to programming, if you can also tell me the human readable variable that I used that caused this issue, the one that was nil, and the exact line (the stack trace purely by itself can be confusing) that little touch would go a long way. For example compare that error message to something highlighted in a different color that says "The variable you used called "contact" on line 87 was found to be nil, this is likely causing this issue". This way when you run into the error and are scanning the stack trace, the computer is telling you as quickly as possible what may be wrong, again for a novice since the way the original error is written for someone more experienced is likely succinct enough. |
Why doesn't every error message have a link to a specific page with discussions, instructions, etc. Or maybe even a button you can click where the machine tries a best guess at an automatic fix?