Hacker News Reader

Comment by new_guy | Hacker News Reader

Have a completely non-technical person try to use it. It's easy for us to forget there's a learning barrier to using most software, especially when we wrote it ourselves.

View on HN

I used to write libraries and have non-technical people who never programmed follow the documentation and use them. My reference point is that if they could do it, then programmers will have no trouble doing it.

The next best thing is writing the doc before the actual code, and have others look at it and see if it makes sense, then I'd write the code that makes that possible.[0]

- [0]: https://github.com/minio/minio-py/issues/829#issuecomment-65...

Ah. Completely valid. I think I should do the same.

I also do screencasts speedrunning through the product. It's amazing how many quirks and UX smells that became invisible this uncovers. In other words, a crappy UX you deal with daily to the point it becomes invisible magically becomes blatant when you record a video. Cognitive dissonance and all. You find yourself saying "And you can simply do X", but find yourself clicking on 23 buttons to do X, or an error message you instinctively used to dismiss pops out, and it makes you unconfortable.

My videos are full of swear words and surface these issues.

And what should be the best way to collect the feedback from the users?

We've added a Slack workspace and monitor analytics. Given that it started as an internal platform, we asked our internal users on what sucked, why were they not using the product. We note everything. We improve based on highest-impact/pain. Rinse, repeat.

We also are users ourselves.

We also send emails to other users and ask them to rant. Our emails even contain an explicit request to rant.

I will do the same thank you. How to do you measure if people are finding it easy or not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com