Inviting more users

Over the last few weeks, I’ve made more iterations and bug fixes to the app. For the most part, suggestions have come from friends and colleagues. Today, I was invited to talk about this whole project at our monthly all-staff meeting.

To be honest, I’m always excited to share what I’m working on, but this time I was also nervous. I was afraid that people might not understand what I’m trying to do with this experimental approach. It’s easy to be critical of endeavors like these. After all, at ThreeFiveTwo, our typical enterprise solution is much more sophisticated and polished. This is in part because of a larger team of skilled professionals coming together. But that also comes with a heavier process, which is what I’m trying to avoid with this experiment.

So I put together a quick presentation using Google Slides with a simple structure (and a healthy injection of memes and Comic Sans). Keeping in mind, many folks on the call are not developers and have never heard of MarinaraTimer.

• What is MarinaraTimer?
• How it’s being used by the community
• Why we’ve been largely neglecting it
• What is “functional prototyping”?
• Why functional prototyping could be a useful tool for us
• The new MarinaraTimer experimental setup
• How our functional prototype has been evolving
• The experimental tech stack
• Thanks!

It took about 12 minutes to run through. The response was very positive. There seems to be a common thread across our organization: We all wish we could work more directly with users every day, working with them to solve their needs and wants, seeing the direct impact of our work. But for a variety of reasons, barriers crop up that prevent us from doing so. I’d like to dive deeper on that, but it’s a topic for another day.

Let ‘er rip

After the solid reception at the all-staff meeting, I figured it was about time to open this up to actual users. You know, strangers on the Internet. Scary. I knew I should have done this sooner, but it’s a real internal struggle to open yourself up for critique, especially if you are introverted, shy, or a perfectionist about your work. I’m three-for-three.

It’s a real internal struggle to open yourself up for critique, especially if you are introverted, shy, or a perfectionist about your work.

So I got over my fear and focused on the goal: get real feedback from real people. I created a badge that floats in the corner of MarinaraTimer.com, and links to our Dev Blog.

I gave users the option to close the badge, and it will stay closed for a month. I’m launching this badge tonight, so in theory, hundreds of people per day should notice it. Typically, you can expect the vast majority to close it or ignore it, and fewer still to click in, try the prototype, and provide feedback. But even if a half-a-percent of users make it through that funnel, I’ll get 1 or 2 pieces of feedback per week.

Here’s to going from zero to one!