Hey Product Hunt
I'm really excited to share early access to Cassette, just for the Product Hunt community.
Cassette is the best way for designers to record & share user interviews. With almost no overhead, you can record, transcribe, and bookmark key moments in user interviews – and share it all with your team.
The app was designed by designers from Stanford d.school and UCLA Cognitive Science in collaboration with David Kelley (cofounder of IDEO and d.school). The team has worked together in the past to build Funder (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...).
We are passionate about helping people become more creative. Cassette is designed with a lot of clever scaffolding to help rookie designers become better at their craft. It's also a powerful tool that lets expert designers focus on interviewing and not have to worry about notetaking.
We hope that this allows designers to get out of the building more often and talk to real users instead of having to worry about scheduling with a notetaker.
NOTE: If you mention PH in your invite request, we'll bump you to the top!
Can't wait to hear your thoughts,
Angad
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@preetangad Hey, Angad – congrats. It looks like a well-executed app that could help many speed up their participatory research workflows!
Many including ethnographers, who might be another audience you want to target in the future.
As an aside: who's your biggest competitor in this space, do you think? LiveScribe pens afford a related (but different) functionality – are they it?
@preetangad Angad I'm assuming this will launch for iOS? Seems that many here are just excited about the idea of voice transcription in an app on their phone...
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@preetangad this app sounds great! Mentioned PH under company- hopefully that will work for the bump
@joshmuccio@preetangad We'll be starting with iOS, with web sharing and collaboration on any device.
For us, the idea of voice transcription on a phone is exciting because it allows designers to finally get the most from the impromptu conversations – in coffee shops, casual meetings, out in the world – that make up so much of user research.
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This is looking very interesting even for non-designers. Is there a way to export the audio recording and the transcript for editing outside of the app?
@janet_alexandersson Hi Janet, delighted to hear that non-designers think this is compelling too.
Out of curiosity, what use case do you have in mind?
To answer your question, you can edit the audio recording and the transcript inside of the app itself so you won't need to worry about it doing that outside of the app. As for sharing, we do allow you to share the interview with other teammates who use Cassette, but not outside of the app. We think sharing just the audio file and the transcript outside of the app undermines the power of the product. If you invite collaborators to a project, they can skip to bookmarks, highlight specific parts of the transcript or audio, add comments and search through transcripts of all interviews.
Hope that clarifies it!
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@preetangad@janet_alexandersson I'm sorry, but it looks to me like you're trying to lock users into your app with the usual "Nah we don't have that feature because you don't need it" only with nice wording. A simple audio file on the device is all that takes, you don't even need it as a feature inside the app, you can just tell users the path for saved audio files.
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@preetangad@janet_alexandersson This makes a compelling tool close to useless - and smells of bad business practice and an attempt to log in your user base. It didn't work for AOL in 1995, I doubt it will work for you. Evernote only yesterday posted a blog post, claiming that their success is due to their open nature.
We currently use a variety of tools to record everything from briefing sessions to research, all f these allow sharing. Tools used range from audio to written note taking - Notability, Neo Lab pen, etc. I'd love to take advantage of cassette, but not if you lock in my content.
You're a tool, your job is to make my life easier, not to lock me into an ecosystem.
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@danr_4@preetangad@janet_alexandersson totally agree. a nice spin on the explanation of why, but i agree: it's just locking people into the product. it's an instant reason i wouldn't use this.
also, i don't really understand why it's targeting designers, as it's useful for anyone doing interviews. is there a reason for that?
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@janet_alexandersson yeah, I also had this question. Being able to export is key for the research community as well
@guy Thanks for the comment.
Cassette is an app for recording user interviews. Most designers already use voice recording during both in-person and virtual interviews.
Cassette adds a lot more powerful functionality, including:
- real time transcription, so you can skim or search through an interview instead of having to listen to the entire thing
- one touch bookmarking, so you can revisit and share only the important moments
- seamless collaboration with your entire team
- and more...
Hope this helps!
Angad
@guy Thanks for your support. We've just released Cassette for iOS on the App Store. We're on Product Hunt again today. Would love if you can participate in the discussion there :)
@slashbrady Thanks for your support. We've just released Cassette for iOS on the App Store. We're on Product Hunt again today. Would love if you can participate in the discussion there :)
As a person who does empathy interviews (literally at the d.school) all of the time, I'm SO HAPPY about this and have been toying with building something like it myself. I'm betting we have many mutual friends, Angad!
@mattahorton Matt, great to see you on here and thanks for the encouragement. Huge fan of the CCRMA and obviously share the d.school blood in my veins. Please do tell your friends to sign up too :)
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Cassette looks great. Looks like user interviews won't be a big mess now when you're looking for a specific point from the interview. Beautiful use to of bookmarks and emotions. Eagerly waiting for the invite. :)
@palakzatakia Thanks Palak! Indeed, when designers record 10 hours of user interviews, it's a waste of their time to have to go back and listen to all 10 hours of it. Moreover, given this intensive amount of work involved, no other team member gets to participate in the user research process since it takes too long. By using bookmarks, transcripts etc, we allow anyone to be able to revisit an interview in no time, bringing non-designers into the user research process.
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@preetangad - record and transcribe "worth it's weight in gold" - can see using this for client meetings as well ;)
@skywalker Thanks so much Jonathan. Transcription has definitely always been the holy grail for this use case and that's why the time is just right to launch this now. However, we didn't stop there. From our user testing, we found that the other features like zero-overhead collaboration, revisiting bookmarks and search are just as valuable as the transcription.
@sarthakgrover@skywalker@palakzatakia@mattahorton Thanks so much for your support. We've just released Cassette for iOS on the App Store. We're on Product Hunt again today. Would love if you can participate in the discussion there :)
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Congrats on the launch! We do a bunch of internal 'user testing' and I have yet to come across a tool which would give a 360 view of the user's perspective. I understand the purpose of this app is quite different but it did trigger a wish list for such a tool should you pivot at some point (specifically tied around user experience testing with apps and products) =)
1. Embed this natively within the app being used and allow users to narrate their experience as they go through the screens
2. Alternatively, if it is a stand alone app, allow taking pics during the process so you have those 'bookmarks' and topics tied to a specific screen.
@sarthakgrover Sarthak, that's a great idea but I'm pretty sure there are other apps that solve that problem. For example, Invision now has an integration with Lookback that lets you record video from the front camera while a user clicks through a prototype (http://blog.invisionapp.com/user...)
The opportunity this presents itself for people that do customer discovery is amazing. This is REALLY REALLY cool and I cannot wait to try out 😄 awesome job!!!
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