For me, one of the most important things to pay attention to when developing a product is the user feedback. Since the users are the ones the product is made for, what they think, like or dislike about it should be the basis for (most) of the work put into the product. So I want to collect as much of that feedback as I can, as early as I can, then turn that into new ideas, prioritize those and finally implement new features based on them.

The challenge now is that users can give feedback on a multitude of levels. If I want to capture as much as possible I have to listen to them on as many levels as I can - or at least the ones most used. So here are my feedback channels:

Live Usability Testing

I have started with this yesterday. The product is not available online yet so invited a friend to come over and take a closer look at the development version on my laptop. The basic idea is that you let someone who doesn’t know the product yet either browser around randomly or give him a task to accomplish. While clicking through the site you let her talk out loud what she thinks about what she expects to happen when doing this and that, what she understand and what not. And you sit next to the screen with pen and paper, paying close attention to every move of the cursor, every change in facial expression (watching out for that WTF look on his face) and write everything down. Especially with the first few users you will discover loads of bugs and usability problems you as the developer of the software would never be able to find, because when you use the software, you unconsciously click around those problematic areas that the deeper regions of your brain know about, because it was them who wrote the code that made these areas work (or not).

So we yesterday found a good amount of smaller bugs, unexpected behaviors and other usability problems like texts being too far at the edge of the screen to be noticed.

Feedback form

Also yesterday I added a feedback form to the site so users can send me a short comment whether something works for them or not.

My first idea on this was to simply implement the form myself. Just add a link to the top of the page that says feedback. When someone clicks on it they get directed to a form where they can enter a text and that gets then sent to me via email. What I didn’t like about this solution was that I would have had to implement a feature that would have to do nothing with the product itself, thus stealing time for working on the actual thing. Plus, there must be fancier ways than a simple form, but I don’t want to bother too much with this myself.

So I looked at 3rd party solutions, many choices here:

• Add a link to a lighthouse issue tracker - too technical (you need to understand the concepts of a ticketing system), and users would have to sign up with lighthouse in order to leave a comment
• getsatisfaction.com - much more customer oriented, people can simply write a comment on what they like or not; users still have to sign up with them and they also don’t offer a way to integrate with my site.
• uservoice.com - I finally settled with them. UserVoice adds a feedback button to the right margin of the browser window. When clicking on that a dialog pops up that allows you to enter a comment. What it also allows you is to vote for suggestions made by others. The suggestions are then sorted by most votes, so it’s like digg for user feedback. Cool.

capturing user feedback via UserVoice

Google Analytics

Analytics allows me to monitor the behavior of the users once the site is live by tracking every click on the site. This is more an indirect way of measuring feedback but through statistics you can get a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t. But that’s for later.

Twitter search

As mentioned before I have set up a twitter account for doingText that will announce everything important. I hope that people will start talking about doingText on Twitter once we let a larger amount of people into the closed beta so I have set up a search for doingtext and subscribed to the RSS feed.

Blog

This blog of course is a way to collect feedback, too. Once the beta starts I will hopefully get some comments here when I post keep posting about updates and news.

Conclusion

With this setup I now get direct feedback from people sitting here with me, users of the site can send me their thoughts, I can measure the activity on the site and I know what’s being said on twitter. Not so bad for a start. Now back to fixing the product.

This is the first post about a product I have been working on in the past few weeks. As the name - DoingText - suggests its purpose has to do with texts - and talking about them. The idea for it came to me on a random sunday afternoon while I was chatting with two friends over skype and we complained not about having the right tool for working on another project. Seconds later it struck me that we would not be the only people having this problem, hence there must be a market for it only waiting for me. So I started working.

My process has been heavily influenced by the folks over at 37signals and their getting real philosophy. Most of the time spent so far has been on weekends and evenings, I still have my “day job” as one of the owners of upstream. One thing that has helped me steal some more time for DoingText is that we introduced our version of the 4 day week a couple of month ago: Friday is research day. And my research is now DoingText. Though having brought probably more than 10 Ruby on Rails projects online I can still consider it research. This is the first project without a set deadline, without a fixed amount of money, without a client wanting to see progress a.s.a.p. - it’s my project and I can pay as much attention to any details as I want (and that’s a lot more than in previous projects). Being able to work this way makes it a whole lot of fun to work on, and I hope you will see that too once you get your hands on the product.

I will be starting a closed beta within the next weeks. If you want to be among the first people to try it out please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow doingtext on twitter. You can contact me at alex[at]doingtext.com or via the comments below this post.