Let’s say: you run a Web2.0 site. And you know it’s not perfect (no website is perfect – people just make do with what’s there). And you are actually determined to improve it. Who do you ask?

No: I am not asking you to send me a quote – go away! I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a professional agency to undertake usability testing and get some cool new designs for the interface and processes. Chances are I find out later that this apparently “perfect” solution makes processes too complex or uses the wrong colours for our audience or … well, it’s wrong again in some aspect. Our Web 2.0 site is targeted at teenagers and I predict that no agency out there can give me the right feedback – simply because they are corporate.

The solution is very simple indeed – and it will make for a few very happy teenagers – happy to be able to have input into a new online site and to tell their friends about it. All you need to do is ask a few intelligent and outspoken teenagers for a bit of time and invite them to your office or home for a few hours to do some semi-formal usability testing. You shall be amazed about the results!

I’d like to say special thanks to Charlotte, Will, Peter and Alice for taking the time on Friday for 3 hours to do a thorough usability testing exercise with us at Vquence. It was a lot of fun – and I dare say: for everyone involved. Here is the schedule that we followed.

We started with an introductory 30 min where everybody, including the testers, introduced themselves and we started talking about what we do online, what we love and what we hate – including the testers. This is important because you break down the barriers and create trust.

Then we had a questionnaire for them to fill in (the middle part of the schedule). It took them through the functionality of the site in a logical manner, asking for feedback on the design, the processes, the functionality and the usefulness of the site.

Then we got together again to “vent” all of that frustration. And … boy, did we get feedback! It was totally awesome – the positive feedback actually made us value our previous work a lot higher – and the negative feedback was great because it tells us what to fix or improve. They were quite direct in their criticism and had some great ideas for improvements. Since they know their world and what makes them and their friends click, they are really the only ones who can tell you what is great and what sucks.

Once we fix all the things that we’ve been told, we should probably do another round of testing – with some new teenage blood. But for now, I am extremely happy with the feedback we got – and will need to look for further investment to get all of this great feedback rolled out! 😉

Thanks guys!!

Today, I heard about SlapVid. SlapVid is a demonstrator built on a p2p system built by 4 CMU graduates and supported by Y Combinator. The SlapVid flash player has similar functionality to the Vquence player in that it concatenates slices of videos from a collection. And – like we did for the Vquence alpha – SlapVid’s website presents the top videos from youtube in their demonstrator. Seems a bit of a copycat. 😉

At the moment, you cannot generate SlapStrips yet, but they’re progressing toward it. So are we – and fast – expect to author vquences by the end of this week!

I for one welcome the arrival of our first competitor (even though SlapVid may not be called a complete competitor, because they largely rely on p2p to provide their service, while we rely on our own infrastructure mainly, which will allow much better control over the user experience). A competitor in the market place validates your ideas and business model. It makes the discussion a lot easier than if you have to explain the concept over and over again. Also, if somebody else is doing it, we’re obviously doing something right. Let’s just try and stay ahead of them. 😉

Last night we rolled out some new code onto the Vquence site. We are now fairly happy with the process that we have put in place for creating vquences. That is, us geeks at Vquence are – so we are now allowing friends and family to help us kick it into shape in a closed beta trial. We expect the public beta is not far off now.

Have you ever tried to come up with a good tagline for a new company? In the times of Web 2.0, taglines seem to matter a lot. They are the essence of the elevator pitch. But because they can only be a maximum of 3-4 words long, they tend to be rather meaning less and just contain content-free Web 2.0 buzzwords. In fact, this has become such a fashion that there is a Web 2.0 bullshit generator.

Up until recently, we had the tagline “Making Video Clickable” for Vquence, because we believed that our slicecasting technology helps hyperlink between videos and make video more web-like. However, this phrase is a poor representation of what Vquence does, what services we offer, and how we’re going to make life better. So, a new tagline was in order.

But what a challenge! You have no idea how difficult it is to come up with three words that capture what a company is about! Sure – I have been to management training courses and they say it is an artform to come up with a good mission statement for a company and that some companies spend tens of thousands of dollars just to get it right. But a tagline!? Well, let me tell you, a tagline is harder than a mission statement – probably because of the word count restriction.

We discussed for weeks, we even used the bullshit generator and it became rather ridiculous – in short, we did some serious brainstorming (whenever we were not coding). Finally, our newest team member came up with what we have for now accepted as our new tagline. It has all the key ingredients: it is techy, personal, raises curiosity, but is still meaningful (we hope). So, let me present our shiny new tagline: “Vquence – Slicecasting your internet”.

And if that’s totally meaningless to you, then you need to go to www.vquence.com and try out our slicecasts to make it real. Hmmm, I like it. 🙂

I’ve been rather quiet about what we actually do at Vquence, but I have to say that the recent months of intense development are coming to fruition and we are secretly enjoying the play with the first version of our new product, while at the same time working on bugs, new features, and on a scalable setup.

For those who have read our website and recent blog entries it will be clear that we are working on video, using flash/flex for the development of a playlist player, and are developing a web application service around these playlists using Ruby on Rails. If you want to be one of the first to try it, you can join our mailing list to be invited to a closed user group trial, which we will start a few weeks from now.

For those curious to find out what we really do, we’ve created a white paper – email me and I will shoot it through.