Gathering UX Feedback
In our last post, we discussed the importance of communication and collaboration skills during our developmental journey. How did we utilize these same skills to create a user-centered product?
Our product communicates and collaborates with users inherently while they are using it. We wanted our users to have a meaningful and relevant experience while they use our product, so we also proactively sought out feedback from them.
We started to develop Couch Potato in order to give Hulu users a similar or better experience than Netflix Party gives its users. Then how could we implement our intentions?
So, we definitely needed to encompass user stories and use cases from outside of the development team because it is all about Human-Computer Interaction. We wish we had a large scale production in order to have multiple test cases and test teams. But we did what we could do to gather user feedback.
Here are the methods we used:
- Showed family and friends
Our closest ones are always there to help and give us critical feedback. Caitlin’s picky sister pointed out the design of our extension and showed overall satisfaction (to our relief). Dani’s husband was the one who was always there to research, and pointed out why he can not log out without leaving any messages to the chatting words (I was able to debug one nested code in the backend because of his feedback. Thank you!!!) Grace’s parents didn’t like our first introduction messages (so we used more inclusive language to include people of different generations). My family said to add more games to the chat features such as popcorn throwing to the screen, which is not applicable at this moment with our tech capability.
- Beta tested with other teams in the cohort and asked them to fill out feedback forms
Our Bootcamp Program had beta testing scheduled during our capstone period to test other teams’ products as a part of the agile cycle. For more structured and transparent feedback, we made a Google form for beta testers to fill out. On our questionnaire, we asked, “Does the application match its purpose?” “How intuitive was this application?” “How easy it to navigate?” “What feedback do you have about the UI/UX of our app?” “Did anything break? If so, what user flow resulted in that issue?” “Do you have a recommended feature/amendment to the app that you think would be helpful to you as a user?” “What did you like about the app?” “How satisfied were you with the following?” “How much would you enjoy the ability to synchronize play/pause functionality across users?” (Later, responses we received to the last question were very critical, we will discuss in detail in another post why we couldn’t drop the play/pause functionality.)
- Listened to instructors’ suggestions
Our fellows and instructors acted as users with technical insight. We decided to add pop-up notifications to notify users when they were on the Hulu domain as David, our instructor, suggested. He suggested that adding notifications would lead users to click on the Couch Potato extension. We gladly adopted his suggestion because it added to the usability.
The Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy fully adapted the Agile environment during our senior phase (senior phase is what we called the period when we developed projects in a small team), which is very similar to real-world software development. We had to be a self-organized and cross-functional team with four members as the product owners. Overall, it was valuable to include user experience and expectations to add to our product from all different perspectives. We now fully understand why the product development team needs to be diversified. That inevitably leads to improved product quality, as it allows for the development team to contribute more diverse perspective and anticipate more diverse user experiences.
Please stay tuned for our next post where we discuss Optimizing UX.
Interested in learning more about Couch Potato? Start this blog series from the beginning! And don’t forget to download Couch Potato from the Chrome store so you can start watching shows with friends now! We welcome your feedback.
