Web Developer experience research workstream

This repository hosts the research workstream of the W3C WebDX Community Group, which focuses on coordinating quantitative and qualitative research efforts to better understand the major obstacles and gaps that developers face when using the Web.

In practice, the WebDX Community Group regularly discusses surveys targeted at web developers to:

• Converge on survey questions with survey proposers
• Coordinate survey launch when applicable
• Promote surveys
• Coordinate the publication of survey results when applicable
• Review and interpret survey results
• Feed survey results into appropriate venue (e.g., the Interop project)

History of surveys tracked by the group

Survey	Who/Where	Date	Answers	Raw results	Discussion
State of HTML	Devographics	Sep 2023	21889	N/A (GraphQL endpoint provides aggregated results)	Results (also see Preliminary results)
State of CSS	Devographics	Jun 2023	9108	N/A	Results
Web Security	W3C workshop / MDN	May 2023	297	CSV	Interpretation
Web Components	Web Components CG / MDN	Mar 2023	732	CSV	Interpretation
DevSat Survey	Google	Mar 2023	852	N/A	PDF slides
Browser Support Matrix	Google	Nov 2022	233	N/A	PDF slides
Web Browsers	WebDX / MDN	Oct 2022	964	CSV	Interpretation

Milestones

An explicit goal of some of the recurring surveys is to inform the Interop project on priorities. These surveys need to run in advance of the project's selection process, usually in October.

More broadly speaking, important milestones for recurring surveys tracked by the WebDX Community Group are:

Survey	Start	Review	Date	Results
State of HTML	Mar	Jun	Jul	Oct
State of CSS	Feb	May	Jun	Sep
State of JavaScript	Aug	Oct	Nov	Jan
DevSat survey H1	Dec	Feb	Mar	Apr
DevSat survey H2	Jun	Aug	Sep	Oct

Explorations of possible surveys

See the list of open issues for discussions and explorations of possible surveys.

Background

To learn more about why the project was started and some of the problems it is reponding to, see:

• the 2022 backgrounder,
• the WebDX shared research strategy,
• the Principles for joint developer research.