Some fun news this week: we launched our first (tiny) alpha!
Three people have been using the app, and it’s a good reminder of why the cardinal rule in product is to launch fast. When you’re deep in your own mental model, everything makes sense, until you watch someone else use it.
What they showed us:
- Collectors chase everything. We expected people to flag a handful of cards they wanted. Our first tester flagged hundreds, and since we hadn’t designed for that, each one took two or three tedious taps. He did it anyway, which was our first hint that we had misjudged what people want to keep track of.
- Our shortcut was invisible. We had made logging a card a single tap, but one tester went the long way round every time, digging deep into the catalogue to find each card. It was a classic case of the curse of knowledge: we built it, so we knew exactly where it was, and it never occurred to us to signpost it.
- We missed the obvious. We knew landscape cards existed. But we were so busy obsessing over features and buttons that we never thought hard about the camera, which only handled portrait.
- Duplicates are common. We had thought about duplicates and parked them in the backlog, because why would anyone buy the same card twice? But it happens all the time: lots of cards come from sealed boxes, which are a gamble, so sometimes you get a really valuable card and sometimes one you already own.
So, super useful early feedback. Time to get cracking.