4 ms·

> You have to watch over the users shoulder of have video. Perfect advice. Sadly...

tluyben2 6y ago
Depressing actually. I still don't understand how it works, really. I asked someone how to do something in Postman (I couldn't not immediately find it in Google); he sent me a 15 minute video. Slow, boring, not copy-pastable, etc but yeah it worked. I checked the description and the owner also wrote a blog post, which distilled the 15 minutes in 10 lines, 3 if you exclude the introduction. Vastly more effective; no idea why people prefer videos. I only do when i'm resting ; then I put on some (usually programming language) meetup/event video in the background while resting my eyes. That only helps because i'm not really doing something actionable, but when doing something actionable, reading is always faster and you can copy/paste when there are slabs of code...
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I think you are getting the wrong end of the stick here. In trying to diagnose users issues a video of what they actually did is often 100 times more effective than asking them. It's analogous to having eye witness testimony compared to CCTV / body cam evidence backing up the testimony. In a previous job we used to use some web service where they got users to test your product providing commentary on what they are doing at the same time. It was so useful that we paid an intern to go through the videos and highlight bugs and annotate the times in the videos. I briefly considered creating a startup around similar ideas but got put off by the amount of hard work getting cross platform screen recording working would be.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Ah! Sorry, indeed I understood the reverse; that as product owner you have to make videos to show everything by making videos. Yep, absolutely right!
  - axegon_ 6y ago
    Exactly. Words cannot describe what sort of behaviors I've witnessed over the years. I.e. someone right-clicking copy-pasting 256 separate lines one by one into a text field. Normally a developer would never even consider such a scenario, given that it would take the user a good 40 minutes to do that. But there we go...
    - paledot 6y ago
      Incidentally, this happened to me yesterday. Roll20 told me that my library was full but didn't give me an obvious way to delete more than one item at a time, so I spent 40 minutes reverse engineering their API to batch delete everything I'd uploaded. Naturally, I found the bulk delete function as soon as I had finished.
- korijn 6y ago
  Because a video captures the actual behavior, and writing is subject to what the author thinks is relevant. It might miss crucial bits of info, that cannot be left out in a video.
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    I remember a bug report that had the instructions meticulously written out to reproduce. Only, it didn't reproduce the issue. Luckily I also had a video, and when I watched it, it all made sense (well, why I couldn't reproduce it, the bug was ridiculous and required going through a very specific path to get the state juuuust right). You had to click the "icon" in the top left corner to eventually trigger the bug, not "go back to the app home page" via the back button like what I was doing.

Depressing actually. I still don't understand how it works, really. I asked someone how to do something in Postman (I couldn't not immediately find it in Google); he sent me a 15 minute video. Slow, boring, not copy-pastable, etc but yeah it worked. I checked the description and the owner also wrote a blog post, which distilled the 15 minutes in 10 lines, 3 if you exclude the introduction. Vastly more effective; no idea why people prefer videos. I only do when i'm resting ; then I put on some (usually programming language) meetup/event video in the background while resting my eyes. That only helps because i'm not really doing something actionable, but when doing something actionable, reading is always faster and you can copy/paste when there are slabs of code...

VBprogrammer 6y ago
I think you are getting the wrong end of the stick here. In trying to diagnose users issues a video of what they actually did is often 100 times more effective than asking them. It's analogous to having eye witness testimony compared to CCTV / body cam evidence backing up the testimony. In a previous job we used to use some web service where they got users to test your product providing commentary on what they are doing at the same time. It was so useful that we paid an intern to go through the videos and highlight bugs and annotate the times in the videos. I briefly considered creating a startup around similar ideas but got put off by the amount of hard work getting cross platform screen recording working would be.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Ah! Sorry, indeed I understood the reverse; that as product owner you have to make videos to show everything by making videos. Yep, absolutely right!
- axegon_ 6y ago
  Exactly. Words cannot describe what sort of behaviors I've witnessed over the years. I.e. someone right-clicking copy-pasting 256 separate lines one by one into a text field. Normally a developer would never even consider such a scenario, given that it would take the user a good 40 minutes to do that. But there we go...
  - paledot 6y ago
    Incidentally, this happened to me yesterday. Roll20 told me that my library was full but didn't give me an obvious way to delete more than one item at a time, so I spent 40 minutes reverse engineering their API to batch delete everything I'd uploaded. Naturally, I found the bulk delete function as soon as I had finished.
korijn 6y ago
Because a video captures the actual behavior, and writing is subject to what the author thinks is relevant. It might miss crucial bits of info, that cannot be left out in a video.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  I remember a bug report that had the instructions meticulously written out to reproduce. Only, it didn't reproduce the issue. Luckily I also had a video, and when I watched it, it all made sense (well, why I couldn't reproduce it, the bug was ridiculous and required going through a very specific path to get the state juuuust right). You had to click the "icon" in the top left corner to eventually trigger the bug, not "go back to the app home page" via the back button like what I was doing.