Do you share your complex (yet beautiful and amazing) online work with your family? What do they think about it?
I have a test which I believe is quite important for your start-up, before you release it out in the wild. That is the NCSFMT test, or No Computer Skills Family Members Test. Yes, you read that right! :-)
Remember that most of the people still don’t know what a browser is. So do not expect them to understand or easily use your work.
Why asking your family members first? Because these are the people that trust you and that you trust. And because you tell them about your work anyway. They won’t hesitate to tell you if you look like a fool when you do, because they love you. :-)
So when is the last time you asked for their help on one of your online projects?
Test 1, four months ago
I thought we had a pretty good product, so I decided to run this test with the help of my little sister (22 yrs old). She is using email, and IM software, on Windows 7. She also knows how to open an application, such as 3DSMax or use Microsoft’s Word. She is using her personal computer. But she has no IT skills. None.
I thought I was in good hands, so I asked her to sign-up to Flabell, and download one of the free flash components we offer to our users. The one that she likes the most, so that she’s browsing the website a bit.
The horror
In the second she tried to use a random username and password, I told myself we’re doomed. :-)
-What are you doing? I asked.
- I’m trying to login. She said.
- Oh.. shit. :-(
She was trying to use her YM username and password. I didn’t blame her, for absolutely no computer skills, nor for NOT reading the obvious messages that were RIGHT IN FRONT of her.
I just stood there observing, writing down problems, and at the end of the tests I had 4 (four) A4 papers written on both sides. There were about 60 items I wrote down, which we had to do something about.
Let me tell you that she was not able to download any products or sign-up that day, unless I gave her clues. At that time we had 10% of our users not activating their accounts. It was something we wanted to fix as soon as possible.
The work
We had several weeks of continuous work. I barely enjoyed weekends, or late night resting. We had to go through all this information, and fix as much as we can, or better yet, IMPROVE, because there wasn’t anything that looked broke to us before her testing it. But the fact is, we had much to improve, yet we did not know it.
So in the past months, we changed the menu structure, we redesigned a big part of the website, we put more focus on typography, we improved every little thing we noticed at the first test, and we launched an improved version of Flabell.
I highly recommend you screw activation emails, and also try this amazing tool Userfly (if you have no family members with no IT skills).
Test 2, today
I decided today to ask her to do the same thing. Sign-up on Flabell, and download one of the free components.
Since now – four months later – we have more products, she started to click around on them, which I enjoyed. What I didn’t enjoy is the fact she was trying to interact with buttons, that were on the images. I mean.. since the images were for different Flash Components, their interfaces seemed real to her, so she tried to interact with them. I believe that’s something we have to fix, to make it more obvious that those are images. ;)
But other than this, I only wrote down two things. And in several minutes she was able to sign up and download one of our free products! Yeah! :-)
Managing expectations
I must say that I won’t ever put her try to use one of our products. I believe some products are for people who know how to use them. In our case, for designers and developers, that know about Adobe software or programming.
But what can we do, when there are users that do not know about XML, ActionScript or PHP, that want to use our interactive products on.. let’s say.. their blogs? How can we help those people, who have no IT skills other than writing in their Admin Panel?
Should we expect them to get these skills, or we should just ignore this market?