Get Creative is about us trying new things so this week Tom Natt and I have been getting out and talking to our users.

Whilst we value the use of personas, user stories and user testing we don’t really get out enough and just chat to people about what we’re doing and what they’d expect from it. So today, armed with our camera and notepad, we went out and asked a few questions.

Some of the things we learnt which will affect what we do next…

• People would be motivated by their friends using it – we need to make it more social!
• No need to build in functionality for upload via a phone (eg. iPhone) at this stage – we felt it was very important.
• Consider how this will appeal and be accessed by Alumni – we were thinking more about current students and staff
• Batch upload is important – earlier in the day we decided it wasn’t

We could have spent a lot longer chatting to people but as an exercise it worked really well. We captured video footage of our interviews (using our flip) and came back armed with notes and ideas. It was incredibly useful to hear people describe what would motivate them to use the site, where they’d look for it and how they’d expect to use it.

Whilst we’ve only got a limited set of information for this project this is certainly an exercise we’ll build into our future developments. It taught us a valuable lesson that we can’t just assume we know what people want!