User Feedback: 48 Countries in Four Hours

Here’s the scenario: You have a new app that is (you think) ready for its debut in the public spotlight. Your boss just wants to do one last check to make sure everything goes as planned – are there clear instructions? Is it intuitive? Will users “get” it? Your boss wants to get feedback from real users before the app goes live. Fair enough. That’s doable (you can send it to your friends and family). There’s one catch though: your main users are in France, Germany, and China (where your friends and family, unfortunately, aren’t) and all this feedback has to be in hands of the product team within four hours…

That’s a request that will leave some dead air (and rolling eyes) in the office.

Four hours to source real customers’ responses from around the world may seem like an impossible task. But at the recent DigitalXChange ’17 event, we proved that it is, in fact, doable. And it’s easier than you might think.

Applause has the largest and most powerful crowdtesting community – with more than 300,000 testers operating in all corners of the world.

So when I kicked off a live challenge to our community asking them to share a narrated screen recording of them evaluating digital experiences, I was confident the results would be of the highest quality, but I was a little nervous. Afterall, they do say, “do a demo, lose a deal” (and there I was doing a demo in front of 300 top clients).

Even I was surprised by the responses we received. Not only did our testers come back with valuable user feedback, along with screen recordings to match, they did it all within four hours. Some even came within the first few minutes of posting the challenge.

To make the challenge even more fun (and to prove it was all happening in real time), we asked our community to go to landmarks nearest to them, say “I make software humanly possible,” and take a selfie with something showing the date of the event, which was October 24.

One of my favorite selfies came from a tester who took a picture with her smart TV after asking it to tell her the date. October 24th could clearly be seen on the screen and it was a perfect representation of the intersection between physical and digital experiences. One tester took a picture next to an ATM, which was showing the date and time. We even got one response from Fiji where the day had already advanced to October 25th because of the time zone.