Jeremy, I listened to the discussion in the last hangout on Tiddlywiki's target audience that you raised in response to my comments in this thread. I just wanted add some thoughts to that discussion.
I think the most important thing in working out how to focus the effort, not just for the documentation, but also for the tool itself, is to have a clear understanding of what TW's strengths are.. its USP if you like. There are plenty of note taking tools out there, just as there are many tools for web authoring, data collection, and the various other things that TW can do. We should identify what it is that makes a user choose TW over any of the other tools, and focus on those aspects in development efforts, since those are the things valued by people who choose TW over anything else. I would strongly argue that one thing that is definitely not TW's strength is user friendliness.. I don't think it ever will be its selling point, and trying maximise user friendliness is likely to be a misplaced effort, and could end up diluting TW's strong points. For someone who needs user friendly note taking, something like Evernote, OneNote, a Word document or pen and paper are always going to win out. I would suggest that the features that cause anyone to choose TW are A) the ability to have ownership of the data and the means to access that data, and B) the ability to use a powerful, customisable and extensible platform to organise information in new and interesting / useful ways. Personally, I came to TW for A, and stick with it for both A and B. If we accept these as the key strengths of TW (are there other suggestions?), then we have to acknowledge that the key audience is those people who care about those things, and not the people who can find other tools to do the same job in a more user friendly way. That doesn't mean that TW shouldn't be made more user friendly, just that it should primarily be made more friendly to those users, and not to everyone. Cheers, Neil. On Friday, 2 January 2015 14:58:23 UTC, Neil Griffin wrote: > > Yes, I think the question of who is the target user is an important one. > Most of the discussions I have seen on the forum and in the hangouts seem > to be aiming for promoting TW to an audience with relatively low technical > capability. I think this is a mistake both in terms of maximising the > audience and maximising the impact of Tiddlywiki. I would suggest that the > aim of marketing TW should be to maximise something like the following > product: > > > *size of audience trying TW (A) * probability of user sticking with TW (B) > * benefit received or impact achieved by user (C)* > Targetting a low-tech audience makes A very large, but B and C are likely > to be very low. I think a better result would be achieved by targetting a > smaller, but still substantial technically capable audience, for whom B and > C are much larger. In an ideal world, you would target everyone, but with > finite resources, it is better to go for the low hanging fruit. If I were > to try to promote it to people I know, I would start with my colleagues and > not my Mum. > > Neil. > > > On Friday, 2 January 2015 13:52:15 UTC, Stephen Kimmel wrote: >> >> Neil, >> >> I agree virtually 100% though I suspect we might have some quibbles about >> where the boundary is for who the target user is. I think if it had some >> semblance of a help system other than the full wiki and an editor more like >> what Eric did for TWC, TiddlyWiki could reach a significantly greater >> audience. >> >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
