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One thing I'm curious about - I don't see user research on the list, the closest ones to it are the customer support and maybe the market research as well. Does

by alabut 17y ago

One thing I'm curious about - I don't see user research on the list, the closest ones to it are the customer support and maybe the market research as well. Does your designer cofounder run usability tests? Or do you all take the 37signals approach and rely more on a combination of your gut instincts and customer feedback? Just to disclaim my bias: as a designer, I've slowly dropped the more esoteric UX/interaction tools like card sorting or mental models over the last 2-3 years as I've focused more on startups but usability testing is the one most resistant to being dropped and I still see it as pretty much the gold standard of design feedback.

spencerfry 17y ago
Dave took the gut instincts approach for the current version because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else. The new release that we're working on is a combination of gut instincts and user feedback. Your users don't always know what's best, so you can't base new features or approaches on user feedback alone. I think we'll get more heavily into some A/B testing, but really only on select pages. For example, I want to set up A/B testing for our new sign up page. Right now you can't upgrade immediately when first signing up. You instead need to sign up for a regular Meh account and then upgrade to Whoo! later. I want to test allowing people to upgrade immediately when they first sign up and see how that goes.
- alabut 17y ago
  "because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else" That works pretty well for a v1, Tim O'Reilly had the colorful phrase "fishing with strawberries" to explain why it works so well: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.html http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.h... I'm down with user feedback and a/b tests, I guess I was asking specifically about usability testing though since I don't see it talked about much around here. It's categorically different from the other stuff and yields much more qualitative insights (why did they just do that?) versus the more quantitative results (which page layout has a higher conversion rate?). Plus it's actually a hell of a lot of fun to do! If done right.
  - spencerfry 17y ago
    Wow! Brilliant article. Love it. "On one level, the difference between the two points of view is simply the difference between selling one on one to a very targetted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will match your own "strawberry" profile."
joeythibault 17y ago
Yeah, I think one thing to add to that list is testing. I'm not a programmer, but I have often been able to root out bugs that really affect customer usability (and often can save our programmers time by finding the specific variables that contribute to the bug...which can make fixing them faster). Product testing is really everyone's jobs (in software it's much easier to manage your app if it's something you engage every day). Great list though!

by alabut 17y ago

spencerfry 17y ago

Dave took the gut instincts approach for the current version because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else. The new release that we're working on is a combination of gut instincts and user feedback. Your users don't always know what's best, so you can't base new features or approaches on user feedback alone. I think we'll get more heavily into some A/B testing, but really only on select pages. For example, I want to set up A/B testing for our new sign up page. Right now you can't upgrade immediately when first signing up. You instead need to sign up for a regular Meh account and then upgrade to Whoo! later. I want to test allowing people to upgrade immediately when they first sign up and see how that goes.

alabut 17y ago
"because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else" That works pretty well for a v1, Tim O'Reilly had the colorful phrase "fishing with strawberries" to explain why it works so well: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.html http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.h... I'm down with user feedback and a/b tests, I guess I was asking specifically about usability testing though since I don't see it talked about much around here. It's categorically different from the other stuff and yields much more qualitative insights (why did they just do that?) versus the more quantitative results (which page layout has a higher conversion rate?). Plus it's actually a hell of a lot of fun to do! If done right.
- spencerfry 17y ago
  Wow! Brilliant article. Love it. "On one level, the difference between the two points of view is simply the difference between selling one on one to a very targetted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will match your own "strawberry" profile."

joeythibault 17y ago

Yeah, I think one thing to add to that list is testing. I'm not a programmer, but I have often been able to root out bugs that really affect customer usability (and often can save our programmers time by finding the specific variables that contribute to the bug...which can make fixing them faster). Product testing is really everyone's jobs (in software it's much easier to manage your app if it's something you engage every day). Great list though!