“The envelope please…and the winner is…” Here is Los Angeles, you can’t help but get caught up in Oscar spirit. It’s our city’s big bash and a lot of our friends have their livelihood tied up with who takes home the golden statuettes. Why am I telling you this?
Well, last week, we felt a little like budding actors and actresses hoping we heard our name called and could give our acceptance speech. We conducted user tests, the geeky web equivalent of a People’s Choice Award. How did we fare?
On the front end, great. People really liked the simplicity of design and wording of the homepage, how easy the registration process was, and the idea of the product. One tester was actually a trainer herself and was very excited about posting a real profile.
However, the tests were not without glitches, one of them major. The video and photo uploading are not fun. For a site whose main focus is a video profile, the uploading has to be seamless, fast, and (hopefully) elegant. One problem is when you upload, you can’t tell if anything is happening. It is. You just don’t see it. A 10MB video takes about 2 minutes to load on a fairly fast DSL connection. Considering the video is being compiled into a quick-playing Flash video, this is pretty snappy.
However, if you think nothing is happening, two minutes is an eternity. Each of our three tests failed to submit their profiles because it seemed the system had stopped working when they attempted to upload video. The good news: we think we’ve solved the problem. Once it’s implemented, we’ll test again and let you know the results.
Our big acceptance-speech thank-you’s go first to our idea-generators, designer, writer, pr guru and developers who’ve been hard at work making the dream a reality. Secondly, we’d like to thank usertesting.com. This service is such a great idea. If you need to test your site, use them. You will be amazed. It’s the kind of service we’d like to be: a smart idea executed well and extremely useful.