I'm the co-founder and the chief product officer of small video calling startup
called Confrere
well so my two co-founders they co-founded and were early employee from
a peridot in which is like a video calling tool that's been around in the
browser since 2013 but that's like tailored for a team collaboration but
the tool we're building is targeted for professionals meeting with their
customers who could be like a physician and a patient or a therapist and the
patient a tutor and their student so looking these video calling tools for
everyone that's like a professional and needs to meet people in an easy way in
the browser so yeah they actually had the idea they just invited me along to
the product part
so it's very important to get of course feedback from your colleagues and look
at things with a critical eye but so many of the actual usability issues are
really hard for people to pick up on if you've been working on it so you really
know if something is intuitive if it's like self explanatory the only way to
know that something is self explanatory is to give it to someone that doesn't
have that context and when they've been comparing expert reviews with you stir
testing like as much as half of the problems that come up in the user
testing is overlooked in expert reviews so they're actually not doing user
testing is a huge risk it's like you're basically letting 50% of the usability
issues go out in the wild and we would never accept that with bugs
you know I imagine someone saying oh it's just half of the bugs we can shape
it with half of the bugs people really are you insane we can't do that but
we're doing it with usability issues so really need to change the way we think
about usability I think
oh well I guess a lot of it is about cutting the right corners so for
instance to cut costs when it comes to recruiting could you ask friends of
friends could you go somewhere where the target group already is like if when we
work for in the region post we could go to the post office there were waiting
anyway they were bored and also you don't really need an expensive equipment
you just need a device you already have and then so it's just I think the
basically the only thing you actually need to get if you don't really well
don't already have it is to learn how to not ask leading questions that's
actually the only thing that you need to acquire if you haven't done user testing
before you don't need any equipment you don't need money really to do it you
just need to take the time and it's so valuable is time very well spent so you
can do a lot in like a half a day
nope well I think for everything that we do especially when you have new formats
doing the user testing becomes even more important because it's like it's a new
landscape and for I guess it's a danger also that people have been working a lot
with this kind of formats will know them better and then they will be harder for
them to create something that will also work for someone has no experience with
it so I think it just has to be part of everything that we craft for someone
other than ourselves we always need user testing
under the elevation on a daily basis it's not really user testing tool but I
use envision free hands a hold of the time because we're a remote company
being able to like squid like draw doodles over things it's just like go
back and forth I think I use that every day
so in my talk I try to underscore the value of collaborating and also
collaborating across disciplines and I think often designers come from a
background where there's like still this idea you have to soul genius like the
creative gene is and but if that's the way you've been thought to think about
creativity it's easy to become like very protective of your stuff and you don't
want to show it until it's done but it's really hard today to make something for
the web it's really good without collaborating with other people because
it's becoming so specialized so I'm trying to talk about the way that you
can ask for feedback and give feedback without ending up with design by
committee but also involving other people early on just so that you end up
with a better product