Windows Developer News for the week of Nov 12th, 2010
This week I took a look at the usage of the Windows Developer center and discovered that not very many people are using the browse by resource content that we put together in September. The following pages have been created:
but really have only seen a small amount of traffic. I dove deeper into the resource pages to see which resources people looked at when they went there and I noticed that:
- Our visitors (presumably developers) are most interested in code samples
- Our visitors are clicking on what I see as common challenges and difficult concepts in the coding resources (ATL/C++ more than C#/WPF)
- Our visitors that are looking for video content are looking for managed content.
Looking deeper into how users are getting to the Windows developer center, I noticed that people are most interested in
Given this behavior, I'm surprised that not that many people are using the samples gallery, which makes me wonder whether it's mislabeled or whether the term "sample" is really meaningful to developers. At any rate, this is all fun and exciting for me but it leaves me with tons of questions about the developer audience because i think that there is a bigger story here that the analytics aren't telling - feel free to comment if you have an opinion on this:
- Why do developers go to the developer center? Is it to learn about something? Is it to get the latest news? Is it to get coding ASAP?
- If you were a developer what would you expect clicking on a tab labeled "gallery" for a developer center would do?
- What would get you to come back and check the site regularly?
- Have you ever gone to the developer center looking for something and not found what you were looking for?