The SubHub User Experience Roadshow - Part 1

SubHub's latest platform has been "live" since June this year (2011) and as an Agile based development team we're constantly working to improve it and add new features. As such, I've been looking into our engagement figures and some of this data has led me to believe our platform might not be as easy to use as we'd like in places. Why? Because the percentage of our new signups that are creating new content is not as high as it should be -- which was a bit of a surprise as SubHub is a content management system (CMS)!

So after Simon Murdoch, one of SubHub's investors, pointed me to the DIY Usability solving book by Steve Krug, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, I decided we needed to go talk to people, as soon as we could. Steve's book is great and is a real call to action, so I drew up a list of people I knew professionally, along with people who have used a CMS and people who would give it to me straight.

Paul Hewett was the first on the list and as we sat around my laptop in Starbucks it dawned on me that we should carry out these UX interviews much more often.

With a first class degree in product design, Paul was a great choice for SubHub's first User Experience roadshow session. Paul is a Director at RMG, a Cardiff-based research and marketing company, and also heads up their Direct Marketing department. So Paul has no problem getting to the point and I knew I would be getting honest feedback on our new platform.

Why is this important?

Because not only is honest feedback crucially important to making product development useful, it also reminded me of why I do my job in the first place: to build things that people can use to make their job easier.

Paul's feedback was invaluable and will hopefully make our product even easier for you to use. He was able to spot quite a few, now seemingly obvious, language inconsistencies and some poor navigation choices. In fact, as he guided his way through our sitebuilder setup, the recurring question I had in my mind was "Why didn't I see that?"

This is the main reason behind doing these UX interviews. Often as a developer you can't see the wood for the trees, so we're very grateful for Paul (and RMG) for giving a little of his time to help us clear some of the dead wood away.

If you're busy beavering (sorry, I'll stop with the wood references now) away on a product have a think about doing some usability tests. It's an incredibly effective way of getting someone to show you how your product could be better. That's worth an hour of any developers time!