Day 19 (Feedback Friday): What Got Done

For this week’s Feedback Friday, I tried a suggestion from Michael to do a product breakdown by talking over a video rather than taking screenshots and adding comments. I tried out the format on one of his products, What Got Done.

I thought the the video I recorded today is pretty bad (I’m posting it anyway because what’s the fun in a public journal if I don’t share the ugly parts?), and I’m guessing I’d get better with experience. I was really surprised at the end to see that I had been recording for nearly 12 minutes — I rambled a lot more than I thought I would.

Using a video for feedback is nice because you can now actually see the interactions, but I think the commentary is a lot worse because I’m just spitballing in real-time and don’t have time to really reflect and digest what’s happening. I also can’t go back and add things later. For example, I realized that it’d be really nice to have a way to share on Twitter or email the update to your teammates once you’ve completed your log but I didn’t really touch on that during the video. Other thoughts that occurred to me after the video:

• Some people might not realize that their log is public for everyone to see
• Building a really easy way to send updates to your teammates automatically would be a great way to grow this kind of product and drive adoption

One way to get around this is to play around with the site, take notes, and think about what I want to talk about before I start recording, but that loses a lot of the magic of seeing someone fumble with a product for the first time and learning about potential usability issues. Maybe I’ll try a more planned one for next time instead of winging the whole thing.

I don’t think the one I recorded today is really worth sitting through (also lesson learned: recording in public is a terrible idea), but here it is anyway!