Webmaker/2013plans/product
Priorities for the year:
- Iterate on what "webmaker content" looks like, measure how users react
- starting point: "webmaker lets you make content that is irresistibly hackable"
- Encourage learning by making
- lean into connected learning - make our tools fun, easy and empowering
- Measure learning through badges
- Develop webmaker experiences that work in the spaces where users live online
- Frictionless sharing to Twitter, Tumblr + Facebook
- Facebook app
- Constrained mobile experience
- Localization
- Develop a method for external partnerships / developers to influence codebase
- ability to fork our codebase and submit pull requests that we can integrate
- ability to activate external libraries, eg Processing.js
- Expose enough "code" (e.g., markup) for users to learn web mechanics if desired
- Make working open and agile both work
Development process
- Ship a release a week
- Focus on early wins that help users make more things, more easily
- Integrate with Product Marketing to source and build excitement about new content, features
- Metrics-driven, user-driven priority decision making as we go vs. spec'ing out a year of features now and locking into that.
- Content possibilities and types drive product priorities: we build tools to support creators vs. hoping creators will find uses for the tools
Content process
- Think like a newsroom - react quickly
- Enter and participate in popular culture
Q1 Priorities
P1
Popcorn Maker
- Sequencing in Popcorn Maker
- Fix remixing flow
- A series of known Popcorn Maker UX fails:
- Undo
- Event defaults (remove tedium of changing fonts, for instance)
- Fix weird escaped characters (a byproduct of our security efforts)
Allow users to add an amount of time to an event (not simply the duration of the event)
- Fix layout of tray / make it resizable
- Position new events at mouse location
- Make default new layer on top
- Change background colour of canvas
- Allow users to add an amount of time to an event (not simply the duration of the event)
- Improve how our content is shared across social networks
- Twitter cards (Thimble + Popcorn Maker)
- Extend default embed page to include data about views, other remixes, etc. (i.e., start to explore gallery-like ideas from that single page)
- Facebook
- Research being a Facebook App
- UX work to fit in their box size
- Initial version of our app working in FB, with lots of follow up
Webmaker.org
- A "firehose" gallery of everything people are making with our tools, sortable by most recent and most viewed
- First iteration is an internal tool used to highlight and celebrate what users make
- Following iteration is public facing
- A "mentors" top level page on webmaker.org linking out to community resources
- Refresh voice and tone, celebrate press of popcorn maker etc
Thimble
- Embedding in Thimble
- Remix button in thimble
- Fix Thimble project creation
- html5 linting for projects we publish vs. full review
Content
Immediate creation and testing of content types within existing tool features
Provide offerings for popular events (Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, April Fools)
P2
- Help our users by building support.webmaker.org
- Let users submit their own webmaker projects
- Localize Thimble, Popcorn Maker and Webmaker.org
- Build a robust Facebook app
- Improve Thimble instruction layer
- Improve developer documentation to assist community members
Beyond Q1