Andres Glusman and Karina van Schaardenburg designed Meetup's set-up to be simple and cheap: no dedicated room, no two-way mirrors, just a webcam and a volunteer. This goal is to look for obvious improvements continuously, rather than running outsourced, large-N testing every eighteen months. As important, these tests turn into live task lists, not archived reports. As Glusman describes the goal, it's "Have people who build stuff watch others use the stuff they build."
Mark Hurst, the user experience expert, talks about Tesla -- "time elapsed since labs attended" -- a measure of how long it's been since a company's decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service. Measured in days, Meetup approaches a Tesla of 1.
...Obstacles to getting real feedback are now mainly cultural, not technological; any business that isn't learning from their users doesn't want to learn from their users.
Clay Shirky, "Meetup's Dead Simple User Testing," boingboing.net, 13 Dec 2008, www.boingboing.net/2008/12/13/meetups-dead-simple.html via Northtemple
