Visicog

After tonight’s class, I went to go check out usertesting.com.  I had been discussing drop.io with Meredith on the train home, and decided it would be an interesting test-case. In particular, I wanted to see how easy it was to sign up. My feeling has been that the old signup process (from about a year ago) had a clearer message, but I was curious to see how someone whom had never seen the app before reacted to it.  My scenario was to ask them to imagine they worked at a small office, and that a client asked them to create a site on drop.io to act as a collaboration space.

The signup process was very straight forward. I was able to both create my test and my account on the same page. The value proposition of getting video with audio was also compelling. They also have decent filters to select your audience (gender, age, etc) or you can just specify to use someone with a high rating. This all seemed somewhat familiar to me, as I’ve done a bit of work in the crowdsourcing space with products like Amazon Turk and crowdSpring.

Literally a minute after I posted the job, someone had claimed it as their task. Considering their fast turn-around times, I would have appreciated it if the status on my dashboard had been ajax powered (I had to refresh my page to get the status update - perhaps it does pull the results via ajax but just not as quickly as I would have liked). Thirty minutes later, I’m still waiting for my results. I’ll try to post the video later and my impressions of the quality, and where I could see this service being applicable.