Following on from my previous post, I want to say “thank you” to everyone who has got in touch and got involved – you are pioneers!

An update on where we are right now: paper prototypes v1

To be more specific, we’ve picked two of the ideas that seem to have more pros than cons, turned them into Balsamiq mockups, and are getting them fleshed out with realistic content. We’ll initially make these available to the aforementioned pioneers (thank you again), roll in the feedback, and then open up to get more data on what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve got any questions about this (or what we’re working on right now), feel free to ask me in the comments below.

I’ve had a few people express an interest in the process we’re going through, and I’m more than happy to share details more frequently as we go along – not least because you, dear reader, will help us stay on target and create something Good.

To start with, here’s a quick flashback to bring you all up to speed.

A Brief Retrospective

As you may already know, we’re creating a new publishing asset specifically focused on providing great content for web developers. We don’t yet know exactly what this thing will look like, or exactly how it will work, but we know we want to create something that is useful different.

For my part, I’m seriously excited at the prospect of building a genuinely digital publishing system (as opposed to what most publishing is these days, which is print-style publishing which just happens to be on the web).

The main challenge at this point is working out our build-measure-assess loop to speed up our experimental turn-around, and that’ll get better as we run more trials. Of course, there are a few things we’ve been pondering at this early conceptual stage:

• Do we publishing about heterogeneous technology stacks from day 1, or do we start with ASP.NET (which we’re familiar with) & branch out later? There are challenges with either approach.
• What publishing “modes” are already being well-handled? For example, the likes of Pluralsight, TekPub, and Treehouse have pretty much nailed video training (debate about price, if you like), and unless we think we can do it faster / better / cheaper (unlikely, for the record), we should leave them to it.
• Where should we base whatever we create? Should we create a completely new asset under a new name, graft something onto Simple-Talk (like the labs), or just build something directly into Simple-Talk? It sounds trivial, but it does have at least some impact on infrastructure and what how we manage the different types of content we (will) have.
• Are there any obvious problems or niches that we think could address really well, or should we just throw ideas out and see what readers respond to?
• What kind of users do we want to provide for? This actually deserves a little bit of unpacking…

Why are you here?

We currently divide readers into (broadly) the categories:

• Category 1: I know nothing about X, and I’d like to learn about it.
• Category 2: I know something about X, but I’d like to learn how to do something specific with it.
• Category 3: Ah man, I have a problem with X, and I need to fix it now.

Now that I think about it, I might also include a 4th class of reader:

• Category 4: I’m looking for something interesting to engage my brain.

These are clearly task-based categorizations, and depending on which task you’re performing when you arrive here, you’re going to need different types of content, or will have specific discovery needs. One of the questions that’s at the back of my mind whenever I consider a new idea is “How many of the categories will this satisfy?”

As an example, typical video training is very well suited to categories 1, 2, and 4. StackOverflow is very well suited to category 3, and serves as a sign-posting system to the rest.

Clearly it’s not necessary to satisfy every category need to be useful and popular, but being aware of what behavior readers might be exhibiting when they arrive will help us tune our ideas appropriately.

< / Flashback >

We don’t have clean answers to most of these considerations – they’re things we’re aware of, and each idea we look at is going to be best suited to a different mix of the options I’ve described. Our first experimental loop will be coming full circle in the next few days, so we should start to see how the different possibilities vary between ideas.

Free to chime in with questions and suggestions about anything I’ve just brain-dumped, or at any stage as we go along. If you see anything that intrigued or enrages you, or just have an idea you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.