Reimagining www.asp.net, Part Two: The Support Experience

There are three parts to the overall Support Experience:

1. Getting Started
2. Documentation
3. User-to-user support

Getting Started

As I identified in the previous post, getting new users started quickly is the top priority for the site. Because of this the ‘Getting Started’ section gets its own spot on the main navigation and all the links from the home page for new users lead here.

Note: I wrote this a couple days ago before I knew the MSDN Beginner Developer Center existed which looks like a great resource and meets most of the needs I describe.

New users come in all forms. They could be completely new to programming or be an experienced programmer new to the web. They could be familiar with web development but know nothing about .NET and ASP.NET. Each type of user requires a different starting point and progression:

If you’re new to programming you need a lot of info to get started. The site should provide a basic overview of everything you need to get going: HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (what it is and does instead of how to write it to start), etc. In an ideal world, no one would even get to the point of downloading Visual Studio without knowing how these fundamentals work. Microsoft obviously knew I was going to write about this since they very recently launched the MSDN Beginner Developer Learning Center. The only thing I would change in the Web Track is to move the web basics before the Visual Studio Express basics. Regardless, this content should be co-opted and reused on (or even better, moved to) the ASP.NET site using the same branding.

Sidebar: Why use the same branding?

As much as possible the ASP.NET site should avoid linking out to other Microsoft sites. It should be the only place you need to go for learning and reference material related to ASP.NET. You shouldn’t have to jump around MSDN developer centers, MSDN docs, CodePlex, Channel9, etc. If a site doesn’t reliably give you the information you need quickly when you feel it should, you subconsciously decide not to use it. Causing a context switch is a great way to trigger the feeling of dissatisfaction. Every time you switch sites or branding, you have to reorient yourself. It’s an unnecessary burden on the user. Over time that feeling of ‘slogging through’ has a negative impact on user experience.

All the existing starter content can be reused, with some minor changes to organize it better (grouping by skill level most notably). I would also add some videos and walkthroughs that show building actual application features people are already familiar with instead of showing how to do specific programming tasks (e.g. build a blog vs. displaying a grid).

Documentation

Along those lines, all relevant MSDN docs should be hosted within the site. The current forums are handled this way: only the relevant subforums from the MSDN forums are listed directly on the ASP.NET site. In the same way, only the subset of the MSDN docs that pertain to ASP.NET should be shown right on this site itself, preferably using the content of the MSDN Lightweight view with the frame of the ASP.NET site.

The docs should be prominently featured on the main ‘Support’ page. I don’t understand why the current site doesn’t put any emphasis on links to the docs. Experienced developers coming from other frameworks will expect to have documentation readily available. Check the sites for Django, Rails and PHP. Notice anything in common about what each framework’s main navigation contains? ‘Documentation’

User-to-User Support

I’m a huge StackOverflow fan. They’ve nearly perfected Q & A on the web. In my ideal ASP.NET site, the forums are completely replaced with either a knock off of StackOverflow or a StackExchange install. Anyone that’s used the MSDN forums and StackOverflow knows there’s no comparison. StackOverflow blows it out of the water in every way. You can integrate the user-to-user support with other parts of the site too, like featuring popular questions on the main Support page. I would love to write a lot more about fixing the user-to-user support options, but this is really all I think there is to it.

With a clearer focus, better organization and a better user-to-user support system, the ASP.NET would offer much more compelling reasons for experienced users to return for help.

This was a fairly uneventful section of this exercise but things will pick up in Part 3 when we take on integrating social media concepts into the site.