Hi there. UserDiary was conceived about a month ago at the Box.com hackathon. We won the Parse API prize. That was the initial encouragement to keep pushing forward.
Our mission at UserDiary is to break down barriers between product people and their users. Our goal is to make the process of qualitative user studies painless for the researcher and the participants, so that feedback can be shared freely and data is organized to yeild the clearest insights. The end result, we hope, are better designed products and happier users.
Right now we're in closed alpha with a very raw MVP. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks HN community!
Thanks for the feedback. Seems like we're missing the mark a bit with our story telling. Maybe the audio might have helped. The demo showed a study where the reseracher wanted understand the user behavior of rescue dog owners, maybe to launch a community website for these owners.
The target right now is for people who want to collect a lot of qualitative feedback over time from a select user group. Use cases include beta tests or a screened users from a particular segment (new users, freelancers vs. enterprise, etc.). The goal is to understand user behavior so you can solve real pain points or tweak your value prop to reach them better. One powerful reserach technique is user diary studies (which is where we got our namesake).
We think that user diary studies can be pretty powerful, but they take a lot of time and effort to run. All methods out there are a trade off between ease of use or high maintenance. We want there to be free communication (more qualitative data) yet preserve organization (each user gets their own feed). That way, over time, you get a rich story about Jane, the freelance designer in the midwest, versus John, the cupcake shop owner in Manhattan. Then you can really understand what's driving user behavior for each, and you can take those insights and focus your product accordingly.
Nicely done, I have no idea what it has to do with user tests though. Could one not simply get the exact same functionality by having user send emails, and then viewing them in your inbox? Don't get it.
Hi there. Yes you could. But in my experience in the past, that gets messy real fast. Can you imagine sending email blasts to even 30 people and getting feedback from those people and then wanting to dive deeper with a few of them? Not to mention you also need to BCC everyone to protect ppl's privacy. Then all the feedback is all mixed together with the rest of your email. Yes, there's lots of workarounds like using Mail Chimp and setting up email filters and folders. But it gets old really fast. And that's only the data gathering aspect.
The other half of it is to organize the data automatically so that each user's personal story comes through. One way to do that is to get people to register for some blog like tumblr and post to that, but that's a lot of responsibility on your tester and will likely reduce their response rate.
We aim to fix this tradeoff. And we free up your time to actually act on the feedback and insights.
Also, we've got a bunch of ideas to make it richer beyond just emails--lean startup MVP...maybe we were too minimum here?
"Communicate with users from an integrated dashboard
Free your inbox. Forget BCC & mail merge." The other two benefits are not so clear to me... "No messy onboarding required." what does that mean?
"No messy onboarding required" - it means that your testers don't have to signup or login to send feedback. Their interface is purely email. You pose questions from our dashboard, they get sent an email secretly on the backend. When they reply to that email, it comes back into their feed (which is the third benefit).
Think of it as if you wanted each user to use Posterous to send feedback, except their blog is already private, and they just reply to an email prompt from you to post to it.
Does that make more sense and seem valuable? How might you rephrase the last 2 benefits to make it more clear?
Hrm, just tested it on Chrome on my Mac and it worked. We're using Launchrock to collect signups. Maybe they were down temporarily? Try again or email us directly at greentealabs@gmail.com. Thanks for your interest!
Hrm, that is weird, we got a lot of other sign ups on Launchrock. Pls email us at greentealabs@gmail.com. Can you give some details on your browser too. I'll report to Launchrock. Sorry for the inconvenience.
14 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 45.5 ms ] threadOur mission at UserDiary is to break down barriers between product people and their users. Our goal is to make the process of qualitative user studies painless for the researcher and the participants, so that feedback can be shared freely and data is organized to yeild the clearest insights. The end result, we hope, are better designed products and happier users.
Right now we're in closed alpha with a very raw MVP. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks HN community!
It didn't look bad, but wasn't particularly relevant to feedback management either.
The target right now is for people who want to collect a lot of qualitative feedback over time from a select user group. Use cases include beta tests or a screened users from a particular segment (new users, freelancers vs. enterprise, etc.). The goal is to understand user behavior so you can solve real pain points or tweak your value prop to reach them better. One powerful reserach technique is user diary studies (which is where we got our namesake).
We think that user diary studies can be pretty powerful, but they take a lot of time and effort to run. All methods out there are a trade off between ease of use or high maintenance. We want there to be free communication (more qualitative data) yet preserve organization (each user gets their own feed). That way, over time, you get a rich story about Jane, the freelance designer in the midwest, versus John, the cupcake shop owner in Manhattan. Then you can really understand what's driving user behavior for each, and you can take those insights and focus your product accordingly.
The other half of it is to organize the data automatically so that each user's personal story comes through. One way to do that is to get people to register for some blog like tumblr and post to that, but that's a lot of responsibility on your tester and will likely reduce their response rate.
We aim to fix this tradeoff. And we free up your time to actually act on the feedback and insights.
Also, we've got a bunch of ideas to make it richer beyond just emails--lean startup MVP...maybe we were too minimum here?
Think of it as if you wanted each user to use Posterous to send feedback, except their blog is already private, and they just reply to an email prompt from you to post to it.
Does that make more sense and seem valuable? How might you rephrase the last 2 benefits to make it more clear?