Watch users interact with your software everyday

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I so very, very badly want this to be me:

Every now and again, I see a business doing something so sensible and so radical at the same time that I realize I’m seeing a little piece of the future. I had that feeling last week, after visiting my friend Scott Heiferman at Meetup.

On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed of someone using Meetup. Said user was having a hard time figuring out a new feature, and the product people, riveted, were taking notes. It was the simplest setup I’d ever seen for user feedback, and I asked Scott how often they did that sort of thing. “Every day” came the reply.

Every day. That’s not user testing as a task to be checked off on the way to launch. That’s learning from users as a way of life.

Andres Glusman and Karina van Schaardenburg designed Meetup’s set-up to be simple and cheap: no dedicated room, no two-way mirrors, just a webcam and a volunteer. This goal is to look for obvious improvements continuously, rather than running outsourced, large-N testing every eighteen months. As important, these tests turn into live task lists, not archived reports. As Glusman describes the goal, it’s “Have people who build stuff watch others use the stuff they build.”

I wish I had an office so I could invite people in to work with my software. The idea of doing this every day seems like utopia.

Post external references

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    http://boingboing.net/2008/12/13/meetups-dead-simple.html
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