[Theforum] Demographics

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Wed Nov 7 14:19:06 CST 2001


Dan,

At 11:46 PM 11/7/2001, you wrote:
>i do agree that thelist is more techie than designish. it would be cool to
>include more web-*design* people in the conversation. we should be careful
>not to try to become everything to everybody(or every web person in this
>case) - we should genlty guide the community when we can, but for the most
>part allow it to morph into what it(the community) thinks it should be.

I absolutely agree with you. The community should decide where it should go.

But... we shouldn't err in mistaking cause for effect.

Let me illustrate with an example that's close to home.

Say you redesign a site to look awesome in IE but has serious display 
problems in NS. Two weeks later, you're checking the logs, and you find 
that hey, only 1.5% of your users were Netscape users. You proudly tell 
your boss, "I told you that none of our site visitors use Netscape. We made 
the right decision in doing an IE-only site".

What really happened was that because your site looked so crappy in NS, 
those NS users never came back, and as a result, your IE numbers went up. 
You just mistook cause for effect.

The analogy is that if most of the design, usability, content, etc. people 
stay away from thelist because they think it's not the place for them, the 
effect will be that there will be more discussions on Linux/Oracle/PHP 
etc., leading you to think that in fact, you don't have (m)any designers 
who subscribe to thelist. See what a vicious circle it is?

Here's part of a recent post to thelist by a person called "Jack Hand":

>       a beginning web designer
>       (us lurkers are learning a great deal)

And there are many of them. I'm just trying to think of ways in which we 
can get them to "de-lurk" and show themselves. You say there are more than 
2000 subscribers to thelist. How many of them are lurkers? I haven't seen 
even 1000 people participate (I might be wrong, but it's just my perception).

Regards,

Madhu

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net

Weblog: http://madman.weblogs.com





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