#5— Talking and Listening

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                July 8, 2019

            #5— Talking and Listening

                Because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for.

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Talking To Users Really Works

When I first started working on this product, I had an idea: wouldn't it be cool if you could search for books by topic or theme?

I would tell people about it and they'd say: yeah, that would be awesome! I'd love that!

I was about to start work on this feature, but my user research senses were tingling. I thought about the alpha test and all of the conversations I'd had in the last few months. Topics and themes seemed like a nice-to-have that people responded really well to after I told them about it.

I thought I'd do one last check to make sure and I posted a poll on Instagram:

Of the 53% who responded 'all the time', when quizzed further, I realised that for most of them their needs would be met by being able to search via genre — something I was already working on — and for others, 'all the time' meant once or twice a month, if that.

Given such results, I had no qualms dropping this feature.

In fact, I took great pleasure in deleting the user story from the backlog. 😁

Last week

As suspected, being at a conference did slow me down. However, I spent a lot of time assessing the backlog and making sure I have only the essential things in there.

There might still be some pruning to go, but I'm more confident in reaching my deadline of starting to onboard users by early August. 🤞🏾

This week

I've made sure that I've got clear days this week, so my aim is to do many more stints of the '20 mins on/10 mins off' schedule I discussed last time.

I'm almost done with the core features of searching and filtering by mood. Then I'll start working on the surrounding things that'll make the app usable across the lifecycle of reading a book: viewing more info beyond title and author, marking your read status of a book, and reviewing books when you're done with them.

Let's see how far I get.

Have a great week,

Nadia

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