Shane Vaughan

Note:  This post originally appeared on Balihoo's old blog on 12/4/09 by Kelly Mason

People always say, “Oh, if I could be a fly on that wall.”  First off, it’s odd that as intelligent humans at the top of the food chain, we would wish to be flies, which rarely live longer than a few days and spend the majority of that time on or searching for feces.  While it could be expressed in a more pleasing way (butterfly on the wall, fairy, anything), it is still an interesting sentiment.  The idea being that one can gather uninhibited, and therefore extremely valuable, information if the recipient is invisible (or nearly so).

As Balihoo’s product team, we are constantly seeking information from our users.  I have quickly learned the value of the 5 Why’s, to ensure that I’m getting every piece of information I need in order to get to the bottom of the issue.  “Why do you need that?”  “Why is that necessary for your process?” “Why doesn’t the current feature work?”  (My coworkers love requesting a new feature from me.)  But even if I ask all the questions in the world, we are still missing one valuable perspective, and that is the uninhibited, fly-on-the-wall perspective. 

In an effort to gather this feedback, we went to www.UserTesting.com.  This is a valuable site which allows us to write instructions for accomplishing a specific task on our site, and then to send those instructions to a complete and total stranger who is viewing the site for the very first time.  What I got back was a video of said complete and total stranger trying to complete my task.  The users were great, providing verbal, stream-of-consciousness feedback the entire time.

Watching and hearing someone try to maneuver a site you know so well, when you can’t say anything to guide them through, is a whole new world for a control freak like me.  That button, which caused us to agonize over its positioning, is utterly ignored, while at the same time, these strangers can’t figure out how to move to the next page.  In our efforts to automate marketing with marketing software tools, user feedback is invaluable. 

The reality is, we can’t sit next to our customers all the time.  And we can’t scream and yell in their faces (“The button is at the bottom – the bottom!!”)  And we can’t ask all the right questions, or train users for every possible scenario.  Sometimes we just have to sit back and listen.  Watching someone else go through the site provides information we would never get in a formal training or feedback session, and it also reminds us to never underestimate the importance of usability.  Marketing software tools have to be easy-to-use to be effective.