QA had two big problems. First, it looked too much like a sci-fi robot and people wanted to interact with it rather than the guy controlling it. Second, it was

QA had two big problems. First, it looked too much like a sci-fi robot and people wanted to interact with it rather than the guy controlling it. Second, it was heavy (65 lbs) and fragile. After a couple of smashups we found ourselves just picking up the phone instead of using it. We redesigned QB to look more abstract, so it doesn't seem like a 3rd party in the conversation, and it's light (35 lbs) and padded so we just drive it full tilt all over the office without worrying about the robot or furniture. We originally thought the main use case would be avoiding trips overseas, but we find ourselves using it to ask questions of people in the next office. Email and IM went through the same trend, so I guess that shouldn't be surprising.