One of the big issues with in person user testing is that people lie to you. Not in the sense that they want to hide something from you but rather that they don’t want to hurt your feelings. There are a lot of techniques to combat this; but I’d like to share with you one of my favorite questions that really allow your users to open up to you: “Let’s pretend this is baseball....
I stumbled across this post from my old (and now defunct) tumblr account today. It is dated June 23, 2012, right after I graduated from Stanford to begin working on the startup I will be leaving on August 30, 2013. As I take some steps away from the shore and safety of the bay area I think it’s appropriate to repost. -———————————————————- Tomorrow marks a beginning for my current fledgling startup....
I helped co-found a startup a little under two years ago while I was finishing my senior year of college. There were highs, lows and everything in between. I have journeyed deep into the bowels of iOS, gained some hard won operations wisdom, and improved as a programmer. I have found myself in many a pitch presentation, demos, and customers front offices. All in all it’s been a good ride. I’m leaving for reasons I do not wish to write about extensively on the internet, but it boils down to being unhappy with some management decisions that I cannot agree with....
TLDR - Programmers are bad at giving time estimates so we shouldn’t ask them to. To be more efficient an organization should experiment with a process that simply places 3 items in each developers ‘PQueue’ and let them finish it. PQueue My tech teammate was up from Austin this week and suggested that our dev team try out a process similar to what his old team used at Demand Media. The basic idea is that instead of doing agile or waterfall, Demand Media simply assigned each developer a queue of the highest priority tasks they could be working on at that moment (with a cap of 3)....
In a pitch meeting with Dave Whorton of Tugboat Ventures a few weeks ago he said something that struck a chord with me as an entrepreneur. Give people the opportunity to evangelize your product. He went on to give a few examples of products that do it well: Nest The Nest Thermostat is a thermostat that uses machine learning to save energy (and money) on your energy bills, but Nest also has an iPhone app that lets you control your thermostat remotely....