2025-11-22 –, Plenary Space
Making code for other people to use is hard work. We have to think about bugs, performance, integration, maintainability, and much more. Making user-friendly code is just one of the many priorities competing for time. In the case of the SOFA Stats Python library, user experience is not a nice-to-have. To be successful, SOFA Stats needs to reach beyond the Python community and be usable by people with very modest technical skills. UV makes this a lot easier but we should not underestimate the barrier to non-developers. The library needs to be appealing, welcoming, and even fun. Fun is not a word commonly associated with statistical programming so this clearly requires effort and a strategy. Which is where UX makes a valuable contribution. UX has a systematic hyper-focus on the people the code is intended for, and how to provide them with the best possible experience. For this project, three persona were identified: students, educators, and code contributors. Clarity about target users is crucial to avoid the natural tendency to develop software for people like ourselves. Instead of working from our own assumptions and hunches we interview a representative range of people. Care is taken to avoid only hearing what we want to hear. The process is also iterative. We listen, respond to what we hear, and try again. This talk will explain how UX techniques were used, and what changed in the SOFA Stats library as a result. Maybe you will be inspired to use UX to improve your own project.
Anyone
Grant has been an enthusiastic user of Python for many years and has delivered numerous conference talks, meetup presentations, and training sessions on the language. Grant's open source statistics application, SOFA Statistics (over 300,000 downloads to date) is completely written in Python as is the forthcoming replacement SOFA Stats. More recently, Grant has collaborated with Ben Denham to launch the Lean Python (When Of Python) initiative aimed at ensuring Python lives up to its original promise of simplicity and elegance. Grant currently works in the Tech Insights team at 2degrees and was part of the Data Science Team at Qrious where he processed hundreds of billions of records using PySpark and Python.
Charlotte is a User Experience (UX) Designer from Auckland. After completing her studies with Mission Ready in 2024, she continued refining her skills through online learning and hands-on projects, and is now working with SOFA Stats. She loves uncovering the hidden needs of users, sometimes the things they didn’t even realise they wanted, and transforming them into simple, intuitive designs that users can actually understand. Passionate about the power of UX to transform long-winded, confusing, (or plain ugly!) online systems, Charlotte is excited to create experiences that feel effortless and enjoyable for everyone.