The big user research challenge
Every single design project we worked on at Hanno in the last 2 years required research and testing. And every single time we’d spend a huge chunk of time finding the right users to talk to and scheduling interview sessions with them.
Finding specific people for your research is HARD and proved to be an existing and unresolved problem.
If you’re involved in UX design and research, you’ll know exactly what I am talking about.
If you’re not in the UX field, here’s a fun example:
For a recent project, we had to interview people from South Korea who had booked a flight in the last 6 months. This would have been easy if one of us were actually in South Korea to do the groundwork of finding people to interview. But we weren’t, so how do we find these people? In online forums? Through newspaper ads? Not only are some of these solutions expensive, they’re incredibly time consuming to coordinate too.
What we learnt over time is that this problem wasn’t unique to us. Other early-stage startups and companies we’d talk to were also finding it difficult to reach people of a specific demographic for their user research.
So, we built PingPong. Not only does it give companies access to users from most places in the world to test with, but interviews can easily be done online and from anywhere.
How does Ping Pong work?
People interested in earning incentives in exchange for their opinion and time, sign up to become testers on PingPong. All they need is a computer with microphone, camera and stable internet connection. Once a tester’s account is set up, PingPong will notify him or her of user research campaigns that require people of the tester’s demographic.
Have you ever tried scheduling a call with someone via email? It’s not very fun, especially when you’re both in different timezones. PingPong makes scheduling a breeze for both researchers and users. Researchers specify times they’d like to conduct their interviews and users pick available slots from these times that best suits them. A win-win for both parties that saves everyone from unnecessary e-mail ping pong and makes the entire process a whole lot quicker and smoother.
Once the interview is complete, PingPong handles payment for testers so that companies can move on to more important things like learning more valuable insights about their product by talking to more users.
Where are we?
We’ve validated the demand for a user research platform and have moved on to building PingPong. So far, we’ve had a few happy customers who really like the idea of researching and testing people anywhere in the world and not being restricted by location. This is a powerful feature and we’re working hard to get the platform polished up and ready soon.
If you’re interested to become a tester: Please sign up here.
Are you a UX professional or working on a startup? While we’re still in closed beta, we might be able to give you a demo if you think PingPong might be useful to you. Sign up here.
