User Research Social Networking Service
Imagine a site where companies could identify products they are bringing to market, and potential users would voluntarily, directly guide their product development.
Too often, user-centered design is still an afterthought in product design. It’s costly to do correctly, and the benefits (although very obvious after the fact) are hard to identify, quantify, and communicate. It’s practically impossible to do as a one-man programming team, and it’s still not easy when you’ve got just a few team members. Enter UR SNS - the user-research focused social networking service.
Companies will post products that they are developing, along with some pre-defined customer markets that they believe to exist. They will post a series of qualitative questions about the niche they are trying to fill.
Users sign up, and pick a product they are interested in using. They self-identify from the list of customer roles that the company predefined, and then proceed to answer the qualitative research questions that the company put together. They can either do a voice recording (which will be transcribed automatically), or type up their notes. At the end of the day, users who fill out these surveys can earn software discounts and reputation points which they can use to boost their profile’s visibility on the site.
The software may help the company to conduct qualitative analysis by allowing the company to later hilight quotes and identify key user mental models and behaviors.
This site, while promoting open collaboration and a fun atmosphere, will help to bring down the cost of conducting good user-research. It will encourage users to take an active role in developing their software. It might even be viable for open source projects to use this model to conduct user research - imagine what could happen then?