When I was in Milwaukee a couple of years ago, one of the big highlights of the trip was visiting the major American breweries headquartered there.  Sure, seeing how tons of barley, hops, malt and water turn into a millions cans, bottles, and kegs was cool, but the real payoff was always at the end.  In the tasting room.  Without fail, the end of every tour gave way to a few tastes of classic and experimental brews.  This in itself is nothing extraordinary.  No doubt many of you have been on these same tours, or something just like it.  In the end, it’s a great way for the company to market to a captive audience.  And giving away a few cents worth of free beer certainly provides a huge return on their meager investment.

But things went a little differently when I visited Miller.  Approaching the tasting room, I was definitely ready to have a seat and enjoy my 4 ounces of cold, free beer.  But just as we crossed the threshold, I was approached by a friendly, red shirted Miller employee…and asked if I would participate in a survey.  I somewhat reluctantly consented and was whisked off to a tiny adjoining room.  Once there, I was told that I would be asked to taste several items and give my honest opinion.  And so, tiny cups of crackers, beer, and other unidentifiable beverages began to appear one-by-one through a tiny door in the wall in front of me.  I gave my impressions, and they were diligently recorded by a clipboard-clad Millerite.

Usability Testing @ Fuser

So what does me eating and drinking experimental foods and brews in the Midwest have to do with Fuser?  A lot, actually.  What they were conducting at Miller is the same thing that good software companies with consistently good products do: Usability Testing.  No matter how experienced a Master Brewer or User Experience designer you are, no matter how much market research you have about your target demographic, no feedback is as uniquely valuable as direct feedback from users using your product.

Soon after we released Cyclops (the newest version of Fuser.com) we conducted our own round of Usability Testing.  Over the course of a week we met with 12 different users, each representative of of our user base as a whole, for about 90 minutes.  During that time we asked each user to complete the tasks and questions in a workbook we had prepared.  And most importantly, we asked them to speak aloud.  It may sound strange, but this is the single most important part of testing for me as a designer.  To hear a user’s stream of consciousness while composing a wall post, or choosing a background image gives me a window into the user’s mind that would otherwise be impossible to access.

As they made their way through the tasks, we paid less attention to exactly what was being said (it was all written down and videotaped so we could go back and verify later) and more attention to what they were DOING; their body language, facial expressions, and mouse movements, which we could see on a secondary monitor.  Just like a tell in poker, these physical clues help us key in on frustrations, and design flaws in the product that aren’t necessarily mentioned aloud.

A long week ended with us having met a great bunch of our users, and with a set of fixes we could make immediately to dramatically improve your experience in Fuser.  But identifying immediate problems is only one of the great benefits of Usability Testing.  What makes this exercise so crucial for designers, is that it effectively completes one revolution of the product’s lifecycle.  Not only does it help us reflect on designs already built, it gives us hundreds of ideas and inspirations for the future, helping to push our new designs in the direction of your best interests.

Are you ready to share your experience with Fuser?  I’d love to hear from you.  You can drop me an email at dsaltzman@fuser.com anytime.  If you’re in the Boulder area, I’d love to sit down and have a chat with you too!  Gathering your feedback isn’t something we do once or twice a year, it’s happening everyday.

As a product management team we share our development roadmap with our team on a monthly basis. This gives us a chance to bounce our latest thinking off of the rest of the team. We always get lots of great feedback and questions about why one feature is prioritized before another.
The feature we’re working on now, a contact manager, was met with no questions. Both our customers and our team knew that this was the next step to take. This should be an exciting announcement for our user base as this is one of the most requested features we get. To give you an idea of the process we use here at Fuser to bring features to our users I thought it’d be fun to share what we’ve been doing with the contact manager. Whenever we design a feature here at Fuser it goes through a number of steps.

Idea / Concept
We really wanted to create something different and useful. As a product manager It’s my job to define in the words of our users, what it is exactly that our users want and how they want to use a feature. This is where the idea or concept comes into play. Sometimes the idea pops into your head on the way to the gym or maybe while singing in the shower. Other times ideas come to light through the natural progression of developing a product. For us, the contact manager is a natural progression, now that we’ve combined all of your different email accounts, how about your contacts?  By monitoring our incoming feedback and support there was an ongoing theme about users wanting and needing  a contact manager. We talked about it internally and started brainstorming a design.

Design
The design of a feature is left up to the user experience team.  It’s their job to listen to what the customer is saying and put their words into designs. Here you can see the UX (user experience) team “whiteboarding” a design. This is how everything starts.

UX Whiteboard

After the UX team has whiteboarded the design and possibly made some rough wireframe documents the team has something tangible to start thinking about. These designs stir lots of great debate within the team about how exactly a feature should function, look and feel.

I looked forward to the designs for the contact manager that came from the UX team. The designs that they produced were invaluable in helping the team discuss the contact manager in more detail. Having so many contacts across a number of different email accounts was the big problem that the team needed to get their heads around. If Fuser just imported your contacts for each email account you added, you’d have two, three or four copies of “Kevin” across all of those accounts. Multiply that scenario across all of your contacts. That’s a bunch of duplicates. We originally thought we’d merge them all together into one contact. The designs helped us discover that that implementation wasn’t respecting the user’s data. You may not want us to combine all of that stuff together into one contact. The designs from the user experience team helped us invent a new contact concept called a container. Containers allow us to respect your contact data at each individual service. Instead of merging all of your contact data that we import from across your services, we now create a link to contain them. This allows you to maintain the contact data for each address at the same time, linking contacts so Fuser knows they go together.

Look for more next week on how the contact manager was developed, tested, moved to an Alpha phase and when it will be launched to our users.

Gobble, Gobble. www.billyandgreen.blogspot.com

Happy early Thanksgiving. We thought we’d share our latest work with all of our Fuser users right before the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m sure you’ll all be spending time getting caught up on email and Tweeting like you’ve never tweeted before - at least I know that’s what happens to me after I pledge not to check email “all weekend”

The Fuser team has been working extremely hard over the past 30days squashing bug after bug. We’ve been entirely focused on tightening up the release to make the best experience for all of our Fuser users.

Feedback from our users over the past 30 days has been great as well. It may surprise you to know that we look at every email that is sent to our support team and keep track of all of the great suggestions that everyone sends in.

We feel strongly that the users should help drive the direction of Fuser. We meet once a week to review all of the feedback and make updates to our product roadmap based off of all of your suggestions.

Here are a few things we’ve been working on for Build 588:

• In some rare cases Fuser was acting unresponsive to the user. We’ve added some retry logic to wake the user interface up.
• Drag and drop issues as well as some panels in the interface would mysteriously close
• Improved attachment support when forwarding and downloading
• Improved forwarding of MySpace messages that include embeded content (like YouTube videos)
• Selection issues in the mail grid when scrolling around
• Improved Fuser folder syncing to the underlying service
• Issues with logging into the Fuser forums
• Improved IMAP support

As you can see we touched a number of different areas in Fuser - and we’re committed to continuing to tighten things up.

If you have any question please feel free to get a hold of us at any time. Just send an email to support@fuser.com and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as we can.

Eric and Jeff had a moment last week to show Robert Scoble the in’s and out’s of Fuser. Let’s just say that he’s a believer now. After the interview, the Scobleizer wrote a post on his blog about Fuser and how he’s using it every day.

“That’s what Fuser is for, it gives you a common UI to handle all your social media inboxes. Here I get a 26-minute look at Fuser with a couple of executives from the company. I’ve been using it ever since and love it.” –Robert Scoble

…and the perfect time to intro the new + improved Fuser.com blog.

I’m Dan, Lead User Experience Designer here at Fuser, and I’d like to personally welcome you to our new blog;  thanks for stopping by. This is the place for updates on the new features we’re adding to Fuser all the time.  Check back often for weekly series, team profiles, and more.  If you have any questions about us or just need a little help getting started, email us at support@fuser.com and we’ll get back to you right away.

We’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the new Fuser.com, and it looks and feels great.  Head over to our homepage and sign up for an account if you don’t have one yet.  I know you’ll love it.

After releasing Cyclops at the end of September, we heard tons of great user feedback and conducted a few usability tests to figure out what our users thought of the new design.  We got really valuable feedback and quickly went to work to fix some problematic features.  Here’s the pared down list of the improvements we made this week:

• We added the ability to quickly direct message in our Twitter interface.
• You can now compose a message from anywhere in Fuser, instead of having to be on the Inbox pane.
• We enhanced the services panel so that you can click an account on or off, rather than having to uncheck a small box for each account.
• We added buttons to the services panel so you can quickly turn different parts of Facebook or MySpace communications on or off.
• You can now reply to and forward messages from the preview pane instead of having to open each email.

We love making the changes our users have asked for, so if there’s something that you think could be easier or better looking, we’d love to hear from you!  Leave us a comment or drop us a note at support at fuser dot com.

We’re excited to be an exhibitor at this year’s Defrag conference in Denver, November 3rd and 4th.  We’ve all been voting early so that we can be there in full force, and we’re really looking forward to the day.  Jeff Herman, our CEO, will be speaking on a Keynote panel on the first day, and the rest of the Fuser team will be attending panels and demoing Fuser.  We’re excited to run into some of our old startup friends, and as always, we’re looking forward to meeting new people and finding out about great new companies.  If you’re going to be at Defrag, swing by Fuser’s space to say hello, we’d love to see you!

Our President and CEO, Jeff Herman, met PCWorld’s Mark Sullivan last year and talked with him a little bit about Fuser.  Mark wrote a nice blog post then about our vision and where he thought this space was going.  Jeff’s been in California this week and he had the chance to meetup with Mark again to show him Cyclops.  Read the great post he wrote about our new design and features here.  Thanks, Mark!

We’ve launched a new Ad Campaign called “Never Miss a Message”, and this is one of the videos associated with that campaign.  Check out the Never Miss A Message site, submit lost emails, and watch the rest of the videos and let us know what you think!  We’re having a lot of fun reading the lost messages some of you have already submitted, and we’re pumped to read more as they come in.