So I got a call from our accountant the other day. She told me she was having a few issues with MailChimp, and she wanted my help. I told her, “Stop everything you’re doing. We’ll buy you and your entire staff lunch if you’ll let us swing by your office and watch you build your email campaign.” She agreed, asked her team what they wanted to eat, and sent me the order.

I debated whether or not to just take them all out to a restaurant. Or to give them a big gift certificate, so they can just go themselves some other time.

But I thought it would be neat to watch them eat their lunch with one hand, and try to build an email campaign in MailChimp with the other. Aarron Walter, our user interface guru, calls this ethnographic user testing. Watching users “in the wild.” Dan, my co-founder, calls it “beer can usability.” Watch real people trying to use your app with a beer in one hand, slightly inebriated.

User testing “IRL” is hard to do, but you find out all kinds of weird stuff about your product when you do…

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