Day 61 (Feedback Friday): Push Pull

feedback friday

Recorded this week’s Feedback Friday video on Loom! Much easier than my normal flow of recording on ScreenFlow and then uploading to YouTube.

Today’s product: PushPull by Max Greenwald

I tried to focus on just going through the main flows and not spend too much time in the way of brainstorming new ideas or offering suggestions to keep the video at a somewhat reasonable length (thanks Michael Lynch for the suggestion!).

Normally I encounter lots of places where the UX can be clearer, but using PushPull was very straightforward. I had no trouble accomplishing the main tasks. It feels weird to create a video where I don’t have much feedback to give, but I guess that in itself is feedback: Your product was easy to use!

Summary

Includes some thoughts not included in the video

Highlights

  • Onboarding flow is great at helping me fill out my profile

    • Suggestions were helpful for getting over the difficulty of populating blank fields

  • Suggesting adding my PushPull to my Gmail signature is a fantastic idea for driving discovery

Suggestions

  • Provide a Cancel button in addition to Delete Entry and Save

  • Improved UI design

    • Having an appealing design might make people more excited to share their PushPull profile

    • Cards that are missing titles look strange next to cards with both titles and descriptions

      • If there’s only one piece of information, maybe make that the title rather than the description?

  • Search feels slow

  • Hide unpopulated areas of profiles

    • Seeing headers like “Wild Requests” and “Helpers” when they don’t have any is weird

Thoughts for Feedback Friday

Right now, the videos focus mostly on usability (what are the tricky spots that come up when going through the main flows?) and not so much on product (what would make this product compelling?).

Usability feedback is easy to give and easy for the creator to act on because once you see someone struggle with something, it’s hard to argue that it could be better. Solutions are often obvious as well.

Product feedback is harder to give because it requires much more insight into products and harder to receive because it might not be clear how to act on them / it might be really difficult to act on it. But this kind of feedback can be the most valuable to hear because it’s better to find out fundamental ways that your product can be improved rather than sink a lot of time into optimizing a subpar solution.

In the future, I’m considering diving more into the product side of things and provide my thoughts on how the products I review can be more compelling (in addition to the usability testing) because that could be quite helpful to makers.