Women Who Code is a non profit organization that develops tools and programs to help women engineers achieve career success. Our goal with this project was to communicate directly with the members of our community in order to determine a single need that was shared by the majority of them. This would help the WWCode Core Team to focus their goals and build more effectively.

To do this we conducted user research via surveys distributed in our community Newsletter, the CODE Review, and by speaking directly to our members via voice and video calls. The surveys provided us with hard data while the one on one sessions gave us insight into the real stories, needs, and aspirations of the people we were trying to help.

In the end we were able to determine that the community was made up of two kinds of members: people who were just entering tech, and those who were already advanced in their careers. However we were able to identify a common goal between them, the desire to learn coding skills. We verified this through traffic analytics and determined that we needed to improve our coding resources page to make it more functional and accessible.

The goal of Women Who Code is to help women excel in tech careers. In conducting this user research with our global membership of over 100,000 female engineers, we were trying to better understand the needs of that community so that we could better serve it. While women have always been a force of innovation in technology, there is a gender gap in the industry. Understanding the goals and motivations of women will help us to propel more of them to leadership positions, while helping others to stay in the game even after starting a family or taking a leave of absence.