What happened
This is the finding that ended the run. A non-technical user, two minutes into her first shard, opened the app catalogue and found developer infrastructure sitting next to photos and documents:
Cedalo Management Center — The management center for Eclipse Mosquitto
Convos is an IRC client that brings the IRC experience into the 21st century.
Her words: "That was the moment. This is a list written for computer people." She closed the tab.
Why it matters
Everything before this point had been recovering her confidence — the app strip on the marketing site was the one thing that made her want the product, and the in-shard suggestion dialog ("Replace your filing cabinet with Shard") was the clearest sentence she read anywhere. The catalogue undid it in one screen, because it told her the product is not for her.
This is a curation and presentation problem rather than a "remove these apps" demand. An MQTT broker management console is legitimately useful to somebody; the defect is that it is shown, unsorted and unexplained, to a physiotherapist who wants to scan invoices.
Note the existing curation pass (freeshard/app-store-curation/ in the vault) proposed removing cedalo-management-center on maintenance grounds independently of this. This finding is a second, separate argument against surfacing it by default.
Suggested fix
Some form of audience separation in the catalogue — a default view of end-user apps with developer and infrastructure tooling behind a deliberate choice. Ordering by "what would you like to do" rather than alphabetically would carry the same weight, given how well that framing already tested.
Found by a synthetic user-journey run — an AI agent walking the funnel as a prospective customer (persona: a 54-year-old physiotherapist with no development knowledge). Run id 2026-08-09T21-00-00-novice. Not a report from a real customer. Full report with all 17 findings: freeshard/curious-user-agents/runs/2026-08-09-novice-trial.md in the knowledge vault.
What happened
This is the finding that ended the run. A non-technical user, two minutes into her first shard, opened the app catalogue and found developer infrastructure sitting next to photos and documents:
Her words: "That was the moment. This is a list written for computer people." She closed the tab.
Why it matters
Everything before this point had been recovering her confidence — the app strip on the marketing site was the one thing that made her want the product, and the in-shard suggestion dialog ("Replace your filing cabinet with Shard") was the clearest sentence she read anywhere. The catalogue undid it in one screen, because it told her the product is not for her.
This is a curation and presentation problem rather than a "remove these apps" demand. An MQTT broker management console is legitimately useful to somebody; the defect is that it is shown, unsorted and unexplained, to a physiotherapist who wants to scan invoices.
Note the existing curation pass (
freeshard/app-store-curation/in the vault) proposed removingcedalo-management-centeron maintenance grounds independently of this. This finding is a second, separate argument against surfacing it by default.Suggested fix
Some form of audience separation in the catalogue — a default view of end-user apps with developer and infrastructure tooling behind a deliberate choice. Ordering by "what would you like to do" rather than alphabetically would carry the same weight, given how well that framing already tested.
Found by a synthetic user-journey run — an AI agent walking the funnel as a prospective customer (persona: a 54-year-old physiotherapist with no development knowledge). Run id
2026-08-09T21-00-00-novice. Not a report from a real customer. Full report with all 17 findings:freeshard/curious-user-agents/runs/2026-08-09-novice-trial.mdin the knowledge vault.