Testing, testing

Yesterday evening, in a cosy room at the top of the Coach and Horses, Greek Street (our warm thanks to landlord Alastair Choat for his hospitality), we carried out a user experience test on our forthcoming physical location based web service with the help of Flow Interactive’s Ofer Deshe.

(We’ve given the exclusive on the service to TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher, so we have to be a bit mysterious!).

Ofer began by talking about his work and its value. A clip of Michael Douglas getting out-of-hours breakfast by brandishing a machine gun underlined Ofer’s point that services need to meet real customers’ real and individual needs, or else!

It was fascinating for us to see how a professional user experience consultant like Ofer works, and we got to understand how we could improve various aspects of the service, particularly the clarity with which it communicates its purpose to the uninitiated. Hopefully the other web entrepreneurs who attended picked up useful pointers for testing their own services.

Our heartfelt thanks to Ofer for his skillful facilitation and sharp insights.

Loads of great feedback and ideas were forthcoming in the group discussion after the formal test. It was wonderful to see the blank faces of the audience (as the initial testers tripped over some clunky bugs and half-baked UI features) become lit up with smiles as we let them all get stuck into the service on their own laptops, as a group. Truly, the social aspect of social web services can go a long way to fill in the gaps - especially if the service is simple enough.

Watch this space as we prepare for our private alpha launch, real soon now.