Do you try to find the vowels or eliminate the most common letters?
Wordle has been giving us five-letter words to guess since early 2022.
There are many ways to play the game. To start, some go with ADIEU because it captures AEI and U (but not O). I’ve seen stat nerds reference SLATE and CRANE as optimal initial words.
Of course, what matters more than how you begin is how you respond to the information you get back AFTER (another start word option?):
Squares will turn grey (no match), yellow (right letter, wrong space), or green (right letter, right space).
These signals hopefully lead you toward eventual success in six or fewer tries. As you get closer, you can start to feel that mystery word emerge on your screen.
You’re getting similar signals from your technical audience, but they’re harder to identify.
It would be so much easier if devs would immediately shine a green or yellow light on something that resonates (though you can get some feedback from them).
Instead, you have to translate from other metrics.
For example, these could be “green” signals:
- Readers follow links from blog posts to documentation
- Content gets repeat visits from the same user
- Posts encourage discussion on link aggregators
These are very good signals and you’ll want to try to reproduce them.
Other signals may be only partially positive, like a “yellow” letter:
- Developers arrive, but quickly move on
- Lots of single-page visits to content
- Internal engineers get it, but others seem confused
These mean you got something right, but need improvements to make the most of the opportunity.
Unfortunately, some signals will be grey and were a complete miss. You can still learn something from that, too.
With practice, you’ll be a WHIZZ and will TRACK all the CLUES, while drinking coffee on your couch and playing Wordle.
You might find, as we have with clients, that you don’t need to create everything anew.
You just need to look for the signals and adjust accordingly.
Have you figured out how to reach more of the right developers next year? Now is the time to ensure you have a plan. Tap reply to chat about it.
