Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…No. It's great. We're not deleting nothing. Fine. Usability. I'm a big believer in you want to be data-informed, but you don't want to be so data-driven that you actually don't have a pulse of what real people feel when they're using your product. We're really big into user research, not as it gives you the answer, but it helps at least pose a lot of questions for you when you watch how someone actually uses the software. Historically, it's really hard to get PMs, let alone engineers actually attend user research sessions. What we wound up doing, especially in the pandemic when we first went remote, is now you can dial into usability sessions and to make it really attractive for the team, what we would do is have people live in a thread, write their real time thoughts of ... so painful, how they use that, or I can't believe they missed that, or, oh, that gave me this idea from seeing how they were doing that to do this other thing. Then you wind up having the PMs, the engineers, designers and the user researcher all in one Slack thread live, responding, reacting to usability session. Then suddenly that thread becomes actually the best source of truth for the research report that then gets written up. But I think most importantly, it gets the team almost like the complaint-storms, but actually watching someone else do it in the shoes of an actual human being trying to use the thing that you thought was so brilliant and yet has all these flaws. It's humbling. It's filled with humor and also it's I think really constructive for the teams to do it that way. I was going to ask where they actually share these thoughts. In Slack makes a lot of sense.…

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