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Would you be willing to expand a bit on the user tests? surveys? Counting signups for interest? I'm wondering about other ways to test without a MVP

exdeve 6y ago
I bet they just talk to people, show them the app and watch how they use it. This is the quicker and meaningful user testing I know
- wongarsu 6y ago
  It also doesn't require actually building the app, the user can just tell you which action they take and you draw the next app state on a piece of paper
wpietri 6y ago
Sure! It depends a lot on the product. But in our case, a key interaction was on Facebook. So we pretended to be doing market research on social media and brought a lot of people in for user tests. Eventually we'd have them log in to Facebook on our test computer, asking them what they though of various posts. What they didn't know was that we used Greasemonkey to alter the Facebook page, inserting fake feed items using their real friends. (We told them at the end if they didn't figure it out.) Some people liked what we were doing, but a lot hated it. So many that it was clear we'd never get the market penetration we wanted. My cofounder did a 5-minute video talk about it if you'd like more details. https://vimeo.com/24749599 https://vimeo.com/24749599 As an aside, surveys are worse than useless for this. Look for things that let you understand live user reactions in circumstances that are as real as possible. Signups are a good metric, especially if they'll give you a credit card number up front. But if you can, always back the metric with live user tests and discussion with real users. If you're patient and ask good questions, you can learn a ton.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  cool thanks for sharing! (i think from that video this is your market) it seems like influencer marketing is a thing now, though I might guess you were looking at more 1:1 not social media celebrity:many
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Yes, our goal was to help people make better buying decisions. In the real world, this is frequently a social process. Influencer marketing is sort of the opposite of what we were aiming for.

exdeve 6y ago

I bet they just talk to people, show them the app and watch how they use it. This is the quicker and meaningful user testing I know

wongarsu 6y ago
It also doesn't require actually building the app, the user can just tell you which action they take and you draw the next app state on a piece of paper

wpietri 6y ago

Sure! It depends a lot on the product. But in our case, a key interaction was on Facebook. So we pretended to be doing market research on social media and brought a lot of people in for user tests. Eventually we'd have them log in to Facebook on our test computer, asking them what they though of various posts. What they didn't know was that we used Greasemonkey to alter the Facebook page, inserting fake feed items using their real friends. (We told them at the end if they didn't figure it out.) Some people liked what we were doing, but a lot hated it. So many that it was clear we'd never get the market penetration we wanted. My cofounder did a 5-minute video talk about it if you'd like more details. https://vimeo.com/24749599 https://vimeo.com/24749599 As an aside, surveys are worse than useless for this. Look for things that let you understand live user reactions in circumstances that are as real as possible. Signups are a good metric, especially if they'll give you a credit card number up front. But if you can, always back the metric with live user tests and discussion with real users. If you're patient and ask good questions, you can learn a ton.

dillondoyle 6y ago
cool thanks for sharing! (i think from that video this is your market) it seems like influencer marketing is a thing now, though I might guess you were looking at more 1:1 not social media celebrity:many
- wpietri 6y ago
  Yes, our goal was to help people make better buying decisions. In the real world, this is frequently a social process. Influencer marketing is sort of the opposite of what we were aiming for.