This week on CodePen Radio, we’re talking about users: who our users are, what they expect, where they come from, and things like that.

Doing some research

1:45 We wanted to do some research to understand our users: who is coming to CodePen, and why? Where did they come from? We gathered information from the database, Twitter, GitHub, and Google Analytics.

2:55 Who is going to use your thing? It’s important to think about this question right away. For CodePen, it’s front-end developers. People who want to build code demos. Designers and developers.

Pay attention to what your users are doing with your app

4:17 We cater to front-end developer/designers. The way these people use CodePen influences the features we work on. For example, we launched our blogging feature after seeing users write explanations with code comments inside of their pen.

5:55 We didn’t start off by thinking that users would use CodePen for teaching, or for conferences in presentation mode; but we made it easier for them to use it that way. That was a reaction to the way our users were using our products.

There are so many things you can learn about your users just by talking to them. Those conversations have helped shape our everyday activities.

What kind of users do you want to have?

8:35 Who do you want your users to be? Who do they turn out to be? How much should you shape your service around what you users want?

12:02 We try to have a balancing act between beginner level users, and people who make up the core audience; the pro users that make all the great pens. We want to make CodePen accessible for new users, but not overly simple.

The stats

14:25 We did some research about our users. Here’s what we found:

  1. Close to 70% of CodePen users are on the Chrome browser. The next 20% are on Firefox. IE usage only makes up 1.5%
  2. Only 5% of our traffic comes from mobile devices
  3. We’re close to having 200,000 users
  4. Over 50% of our users have Gmail accounts
  5. Around 65% of CodePen users speak English
  6. 14% of CodePen users are female
  7. 57% of our users are using Windows
  8. 20% of our social media traffic comes from Twitter, 16% from Facebook, 17% from Reddit
  9. We spend 100% of our social media time on Twitter

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