GuessMyPersona

On Tuesday, 210 people played PeopleHunt at an event in London. We were watching from here in Dublin to make sure everything ran smoothly like all good customer care manuals suggest. Initially we saw some awesome behaviour - people were swapping hunt ids, guessing each other and hunting for new people to talk to that were outside their normal peer group.

Our graph was overwhelmed with data, so much so that we had to redesign it mid game in order to accommodate all the connections happening. Things were looking great!

But after forty five minutes, when intense usage normally tapers off, we saw the levels of usage continue to persist. Even from here in Dublin, it seemed a bit odd. Perhaps people were just taking advantage of the opportunity to finally meet and connect with people in their organization... I mean, one person can meet 40 people in 40 minutes, right? One person per 60 seconds? It's possible....


However when one particular player hit a high enough score to suggest that he had spoken to 90 people, we were forced to look closer - not even Adrian in his wildest dreams could manage to approach and have a conversation with 90 people in such a short space of time.

When we took a harder look at the numbers, we saw that we were in the presence of 'killers' - not the PeopleHunt type, but the type of player that just wants to win, and will do anything to do so. It turns out there was an iPad2 up for grabs, and our rules say the person with the highest points, wins, so they were doing whatever they could to get their hands on it.

We realised that because of some recent, seemingly inconsequential design changes, i.e being able to guess a person more than once, we had removed a safety barrier that had forced people to mutually swap hunt ids, and mutually guess before getting points. Without it, you can get points by guessing another person, without them returning the guess. The winning players (as in not just one guy, but the top 10 players) had, we presume, stopped talking to people and were just putting in random numbers and guessing, without finding, talking or even knowing who the other players were!

Although our rules don't explicitly say that the winner is the one that talks to the most people, obviously the goal of the game is to talk to new people, and so in order to reward the players who actually met new people and went to the effort of asking for their number, we decided to create another leaderboard, also on the fly, for the number of mutual guesses. The winner then became the person who had done both - highest correct guesses and highest number of hunt ids swapped through face to face interaction. Talk about quick response time, huh? Don't mess with us, killers!

Who knew that game mechanics were so POWERFUL. If we can tailor them so that killers are happy killing while also interacting with new people, we have it nailed.

A round of applause to Christy who won the iPad2, and a sly grin to our other winner Gavin, who showed us how to improve our product!

So on the back of the Bing user testing, we've shipped the new Hunt feature! Yay!

The change you will see is on your profile page where you will now see two options.

Hunt for a Match is the new functionality. Press it and wait for a few seconds for the system to find you an interesting person nearby to play with, in this case, Kenneth. When you track him down and click Found, you are back to the regular swap screen as before.



The second option, Found an Opponent is the same as before- you can swap your hunt ID with someone you have already found, perhaps an intriguing person standing next to you.

If you notice, underneath Kenneth's photo is a bit of information about what you have in common. It's the first hint of what's to come in future iterations!

Give it a try with the office crowd, on the link: http://crowdscanner.com/hunt and let us know how it goes!

We collected what people liked about PeopleHunt. Here is a short video of some of it!

Here is Part II of our User Testing PeopleHunt post.

What we needed:

To test functionality of the new hunt feature in PeopleHunt.

What we wanted to know:

• would it be possible for people to find one another in a crowded room?
• how would they react to being hunted and approached?
• would people hunt more than once?
• is it better for everyone to hunt at the same time, or stagger the activity?

What we needed in order to test:

A group of 30+ with smartphones
Mobile version of PeopleHunt with new feature
Food and drinks for group
Location to hold the event
Feedback survey
Prizes for winners
Camera to record interactions

Luck:

Met Aya from Bing and they offered to sponsor the event and give us advice from their usability team in Seattle.

On the night:

We let people know we were testing
We let people play without too much intervention
We interviewed players
We held a discussion group afterwards


What was good about it:

We managed to gather all the data we needed to identify the good and bad points of the current feature set.


We were able to see the hunt in action and get a feel for how people were using the product, which was slightly different from how we expected. We imagined two people searching for each other at the same time, synchronously, which did happen, but we also saw people participating in a one sided hunt, and if players couldn't find their target, they just hunted for another one.

It was awesome to watch people connect deeply, hear positive things about the product, and have the chance to record people's reactions.


What was bad about it:

It was not an exact use case. PeopleHunt works best as a session held during a longer conference, not just at a solo networking session, so the players had different expectations. In the end it meant that we had to watch their behaviour more than listen to what they wanted, which is an important thing to consider when creating an artificial use case to test something.

What we learned about the hunt:

We learned that the hunt is an awesome addition to the product, minus a few bugs. It actually took me a week to digest the fact that after all of our experiments, we have indeed created an environment where approaching strangers is acceptable. No need to train as a pick up artist!

Conclusions:

This form of user testing is an important way to test a feature, and to find unexpected hiccups in your product functionality that may be having a negative effect on the user experience. It is great to help you polish a product. However it is limited in how useful it can be to figure out the direction a product should take, or as a replacement for real consumer feedback. Advice, feedback and suggestions for what the product could, should or might be in the future, no matter how well intentioned, should be kept to a minimum!


Thanks to all our guinea pigs, and to Bing for helping us with advice and sponsorship! We really enjoyed and benefitted greatly from watching you use our app. Hopefully we can participate as guinea pigs in other people's events in the future. Do get in touch if you want more details - email me at ellen@crowdscanner.com.