Same with me. I started to complete the survey and got to the question about whether I’m a plugin, theme or core developer. I don’t consider myself any of those so I assumed the survey wasn’t aimed at me. So I didn’t go any further.
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I am ok with as many needed.
@ozfiddler maybe I should add the “I create sites without being a proper developer” to core/themes/plugins?
…I am one myself…
I’m a little confused about who this survey is intended for. It started off sounding like it was for developers, and to me a developer is a programmer… someone who codes.
But are you saying you are wanting any CP user to complete it?
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I don’t know if anyone noticed that the question uses a radio control instead of a checkbox, as if you can only be one of them…
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Not quite any CP user, Oz. @ozfiddler
There will be separate surveys for other user types.
For this one, we are interested in a user who has designed at least one “custom” solution for their site or for a client site. Even if it is a very simple one.
So someone who has at least some rudimentary understanding of code as opposed to a more “passive consumer” type if this makes sense.
We would like to see if there are similarities / startling differences between these and the “developer by trade”.
Joy is right about radio buttons vs checkboxes for the core / plugin / theme question.
It originally asked which do you primarily develop for (create code for).
There is actually a good reason for asking this as outlined earlier during the thread.
Perhaps the way to solve the issue would be to add options for “none” and “I spend my time relatively equally on all of these.”
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For me, the survey felt a bit all over the place as I went through it. It could have used a bit more fine tuning. That said, I’m not feelin’ the idea of taking it over and over again as it iterates. I spent about 20 minutes on it to really think it through, but, still had more blanks than I’d have liked.
Some specific areas of difficulty in answering…
-
The radio buttons instead of checkboxes were limiting; I could have marked them all.
-
Some questions had a lot of options, but they were so specific that none applied.
-
The age/gender questions; I haven’t answered these types of questions in a decade.
-
The question about what other programming languages we knew seemed irrelevant. The list of options pretty much encompasses the entirety of ClassicPress.
-
The question about which items to keep in core, move to plugins, etc… the options seemed backward so I had to keep re-reading it to be sure. It had:
- 0 = This is a useful function. It should be enabled by default in the Core.
- 5 = No CP resources should be committed to this function. It should use a third-party plugin.
This is intended as constructive criticism. I think it’s great that @ElisabettaCarrara and others have jumped in to get this moving – it’s always inspiring to see people working together. 
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Thank you for taking the time to help out. It is really appreciated.
Believe it or not, blanks are useful in an analysis like this too 
Or rather, which combinations of questions the respondent answered.
There is room for improvement in terms of the “user experience” part of the survey and I think that can be improved before making it available to people outside of the CP community without the need for people to re-take each iteration.
You can do conditional surveys with the Google form, right?
Q1.
Have you ever created a custom solution for your site or a client site?
(This includes contributing to core infrastructure, writing a simple custom plugin, making use of your functions.php file or making custom alterations to your theme.)
If no, exit the survey and display the message “Thank you very much for your time. Please keep an eye open for our consumer survey.”
Since the developer question causes confusion, this can be addressed by:
Have you used WordPress?
Never
1 - 5 years
6 - 10 years
More than 10 years
and
How long ago did you create your first custom solution for your site or for a client site?
(This includes contributing to core infrastructure, writing a simple custom plugin, making use of your functions.php file or making custom alterations to your theme and it can be on any CMS platform.)
Never
Less than a year ago
Less than 5 years ago
Less than 10 years ago
More than 10 years ago
With regard to the radio button issue:
When you create a custom solution, it is most likely a:
Contribution to core
Plugin
Theme
Equally likely to be any of the above
None of the above
The web professional concern can be improved slightly by:
If you provide websites to clients, what would motivate you to recommend ClassicPress to them?
and by adding
When creating a custom solution, this is most likely to be for:
Myself
A client site
A repository / directory
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Going to address amendments this afternoon.
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I was creating websites in html/css/php and then added WordPress as a cms to existing designs to give easier editable areas to pages. Then as time progressed WordPress became the main frame work. I have a base theme I use (mostly my own), and just create custom pages to match the design, edit the functions file and a plugin folder.
I have created sites with custom fields without using a plugin although I used some copied and edited code.
I edit existing js, php etc. but would be really pushed to create a whole site from scratch. (I know there is no point in recreating something that already exists even just from time constraints ) so where possible I use existing pieces.
I would not regard myself as a “developer” but where on the developer scale does this put me?
Here is a screenshot of how the poll appears in my browser
Hallo @Mark
Thanks for helping out.
It is really appreciated.
This would mostly come out in your coding skills.
So, personally, I’d say “3 - I can adapt existing code to suit my needs” for all the coding languages where this applies, as this is what you mostly do, even though you could theoretically create an entirely new plugin.
As to plugin vs theme, that would depend on what you personally spend more time on.
If it is a close thing, pick your “gut instinct” (what you feel a closer affinity for / enjoy more).
Hope that helps clarify.
Have a lovely (what remains of ) the weekend!
I’ve completed the questionnaire on second attempt.
As a short aside, there are radio buttons where there should be checkboxes and then checkboxes where should be radio buttons.
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No problem.
As I’ve said before, unlike people like @anon71687268, I don’t regard myself as a real developer; all of my plugins were created to add functionality I wanted rather than for other people.
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That is exactly the sort of useful, actionable data we need in order to be able to build a user experience journey, @azurecurve 
We expect to see some at least three personas (personalities) under the dev profile (perhaps more).
There is method to the madness, I promise.
We suspect that “devs by necessity” are likely to use and to contribute to open source code.
And a couple of other things, but that is a long post. Lol.
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Hi ALS,
I don’t have time to read 90 posts right now in this thread 
If it is possible to do a recap so also for others is more simple to understand the discussion?
Sure.
RECAP FOR NEW READERS
We believe that it is important to share common values / priorities across an organization in order to be successful. (So developers and marketers need to talk to one another and have the same end goal.)
We believe that it is important to articulate a Value Proposition / Unique Selling Point before v2 is released.
This value proposition is closely related to defining target markets, as mentioned in an exchange with Tim.
In order to articulate a Value Proposition, we would like to:
- Create marketing personas (fictional character bios with names, images, back-stories);
- Map user experience journeys.
User Experience Journeys are very useful for making user documentation as intuitive as possible.
It also helps define the sales funnel (including for monetization considerations) later on.
In order to create the marketing personas, we need to see whether our hypotheses hold true or not.
@ElisabettaCarrara created a Google survey for us to collect some basic data.
A couple of committee members have had a look at the survey.
Michelle has been following the discussion and also tagged Ray.
A large number of users provided input.
There are currently four main personas:
Dev; Web Professional; Semi-Corporate Business User; Casual User.
We suspect that there are at least three personalities within the main dev persona.
We need to finish collecting data and then analyze it before recommendations can be made.
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Excellent Summary! And many thanks to you, @anon71742606 and @ElisabettaCarrara for moving this forward.
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Personas are always useful.
My only doubt is about the purpose for use them, I mean for contributing or use the software?
If it is the first group:
- Backend Developer
- Frontend Developer
- Casual user
- Marketer
- Designer
In this way we have the biggest group of people that usually act also in others like localizing or documenting/training stuff as example.
https://make.wordpress.org/ is an helpful resource on that, the team are like the personas because people help in this kind of group activities.
If it is to use the software:
- Technician
- Backend Developer
- Frontend Developer
- Sysadmin/Assistence
- Casual user
- Marketer
- Designer
- Semi-Corporate Business User
- E-Commerce/E-Digital service Seller
- Magazine editors (or authors)
- Entrepreneurs/Startup
In my experience inside WordPress, in the community and in my work this are the various group of persona as user of the software.
Why contributing and users as personas are different? Because when you choose to contribute the reasons are usually personal or because you want to learn more so you put yourself initially at a very low point and only after you use all the skills.
Basically when someone chose to join a community is like at level 1, after a bit of confidence and how a community works this level up and use all the experience like you are doing when joined this community.
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There is a spectrum from die-hard contributors to apathetic consumers.
Of course, most people fall somewhere in the middle.
We expect to see some links to the technology adoption cycle.
There was some discussion earlier in the thread about “devs by necessity”.
So, this would be someone who has a different profession (sometimes very different indeed), who needed an online channel and started creating custom solutions because they could not find all the functionalities that they needed.
We expect to see differences between contributors and consumers.
However, we also believe that there will be a (potentially large) overlap.
We would like to see which factors distinguish a “consumer” from an “inexperienced contributor”.
Edit: We suspect that CP may be reaching saturation for “innovator” adopters and that it would be beneficial to put some thought into attracting “early adopters” without alienating innovator types. We would like for integration to be as smooth as possible.
I like this phrasing by Elisabetta on the technology adoption cycle thread.
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I am back.
Caffeinating myself at the moment 
and catching up.
@Mte90 yours is a valuable input, and very detailed. I feel however at this stage we need to start assessing a broader idea, then we may refine, because our userbase is not as big as wp’s hence not so variegated.
In the future it’s definitely possible for us to reach that level of complexity however.
My concern about those surveys is that having a small userbase we may get partial information. but this is a risk we need to undergo if we want to have at least an idea of the situation now.
Thanks for all your feedback.
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