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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 tha

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."

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."