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World Usability Day Detroit: Quick Notes

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World Usability Day

I just came home from a great World Usability Day event with our Detroit User Experience group. I wasn’t sure what to expect, this was our first “formal” type of presentation for the group.

Jeff Tengler speaking at World Usability Day 2013

We had a great turnout for our two featured speakers, Jeff Greer from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Steve Tengler from Altia, Inc. Excellent presentations and great questions from the attendees.

Steve Tengler speaking at World Usability Day Detroit

Expect to see notes posted from the event on the blog in the next few days. In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple photos and a video of users talking about the touchscreen insulin pump Steve Tengler discussed during his talk.

What I found so interesting about the video was the delight shared by the users, something they didn’t experience previously with devices they used.

Takeaways from The State of the Word 2013

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Matt Mullenweg State of the Word 2013
At yesterday’s WordCamp San Francisco 2013 conference, Matt Mullenweg delivered the annual State of The Word address, focusing on WordPress updates in the past year as well as future plans. In addition, Matt shared the results of the annual survey, completed by 30,000 WordPress users and developers.

Check out the video, my takeaways, and the social conversation. Sorry, there’s no transcript or captions for the video (Update: As of July 29, transcripts are in the works).

Takeaways from The State of the Word

In 2012:

  • 18.9% of the web runs WordPress, up 2.2%
  • 1026 unique WordCamp speakers
  • 1.4 million views of WordCamp videos on WordPress.tv
  • 10th anniversary celebration on May 27
  • 3.5 version was released as well as Twenty Twelve theme
  • 46+ million downloads of WordPress
  • 336 new themes added to the repository, 2.3X as many as 2011
  • 15 updates to the mobile apps

There are over 26,000 plugins in the plugin repository.

Survey Results

  • Over 30,000 responses from 178 countries
  • Most favorite things about WordPress: community and ease of use
  • Plugins are the least favorite things about WordPress
  • 12% are using WordPress from a desktop application

Future Plans for WordPress

  • Development for versions 3.7 and 3.8 begin simultaneously July 28
  • Version 3.7 to be released in early October 2013
    • Platform update
    • Led by Andrew Nacin and Jon Cave
    • Focused on security and stability
  • Version 3.8 to be released in December 2013
    • Matt is heading up the 3.8 development effort
    • MP6 and Twenty Fourteen theme will be in version 3.8
    • Twenty Fourteen will be a magazine style theme

Other News

Of the 55,000 blogs created last week on WordPress.com, only 4% are active. New developer resource developer.wordpress.org has launched.

Social Conversation

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