Cutting Out the Middle (Wo)Men
December 17, 2007
Our first two customers are South Street Steaks and Aqui Brazilian Coffee respectively. As you can see, the sites will eventually need new designs; however, both establishments helped us develop a solid system, have been great beta-testers, and most importantly, they love SandwichBoard.
Today I walked Carminha Simmons of Aqui through SandwichBoard. She added a news article, event, and web page herself during the training. While she used the system, I took notes on anything she didn’t understand, things she got stuck on, and features that broke. When I got back to my home office in the afternoon, I went through my list and fixed the majority of the issues or UI flaws I saw before dinner.
I had direct contact with the customer and saw her every mouse click and facial expression. I was able to discuss with her how to fix things she didn’t understand. I didn’t have to go through a committee or get permission to fix what we thought was broken. All we have to do now is run a command to update our system live in a matter of minutes. Try doing that when working in an organization divided into job functions and heavy processes.
December 20, 2007 at 4:24 pm
nice! sounds like a great agile development model combined with a lot of the techniques we learned in HCI at UMD.
December 20, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Nick –
Yeah, pretty much. Except it’s more bits-and-pieces of those and it’s all ingrained in the way we think and work now instead of forcing process on what we do.