launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I'd like to try something new: recruiting user testing participants at
the very moment they are using the part of Launchpad we're testing.

I believe this could help us get better results: if people are doing
something for real, rather than pretending to do something in the
confines of a testing session, I think we'll get better answers. Sony
and others have tried this, while working with the San Francisco user
research agency Bolt Peters.

Here's how I imagine it'd work. Let's say we're adding an in-line
commenting feature to diffs in merge proposals. When someone was
looking at a merge proposal page, we could pop-up a JS overlay that
invites them to take part in a phone/Skype call. They'd have the
option to enter their phone number/Skype ID/whatever, or select "Ask
me another time" or "Never ask me about this again".

Later in the development process we could put the participant in the
right team to get the feature flag to see the in-development feature
and give us feedback on the feature as it is using their real data.

If we wanted to do something more sophisticated, we could have some
kind chat in the overlay to make it a bit friendlier and easier to
organise.

Alternatively, we could perhaps avoid the overlay altogether and
Launchpad could ping the researcher (probably one of the Product team)
with the person's IRC nick and we could contact them that way.
However, clearly that limits us to people using IRC at that time.

I'm interested in your views on whether this is a good idea and how we
might implement it.

Cheers.

-- 
Matthew Revell -- https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell
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