Kevin Xu

Cassette - The best way for designers to record & share user interviews

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Jonathan Z. White
First of all, the design for this looks great. There have been many times where I've done an interview with a user and missed something he/she said because I was too busy scribbling notes down in a notepad.
Jake Doering
@jonathanzwhite Hey Jonathan, I'm the designer. Thanks so much for your high praise! I've had the same frustration many a time. We are so excited to be working on a tool that will offer the freedom to focus on your conversations. Our hope is that more and more designers will get to the deeper insights that come from listening not just to what someone says, but how they say it.
Sergio Majluf
Love the idea, and UI seems nice. Would love to try it out, but didn't mention PH while requesting the invite :/
Jake Doering
@sergiomajluf Hey Sergio, thanks so much! I'll add a note about PH to your request ;)
Kunal Bhatia
Fantastic idea @preetangad! I can't wait to use this for ethnography. The combination of bookmarks and transcription are really powerful in their own way, however, the suggested questions feature is like having your own researcher to collaborate with in developing a script. Frequently, I'm also doing user testing, and it's hard to administer the test and take notes at the same time. Any chance you may expand into something like this? (If you're curious, my typical setup is a screen sharing platform, like Google Hangouts w/ video, recording via Quicktime, and Google Sheets for note taking).
Angad Singh
@kunalslab Hi Kunal, thanks so much for the compliments. Glad you love the feature set. We've thought about the idea of building a Google Hangouts plugin or a screen capture utility for Skype and it's on our roadmap. However, that has it's own set of challenges including a whole different UI, much higher processing requirements for real-time transcription and more expensive storage.
Kunal Bhatia
@preetangad great! I'll be eagerly awaiting for that as all the technical challenges melt away.
David Milberg
Awesome product!
Jake Doering
@davidmilbergnyc Thanks, David! We are so excited to share it with you soon.
Angad Singh
@davidmilbergnyc @whattheferguson @kunalslab @romanzadyrako @roman_temkin 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 :)
Adrian Herritt
Ohhhh, nice. LOTS of potential here. Video takes up too much space, but audio shouldn't be an issue. Would be nice to take a photo of the user, attach it to the interview and then share it with your team. Will there be a web interface/embed output that we can share? Looking forward to an invite!
Angad Singh
@adrianherritt Hi Adrian, those are great ideas and we couldn't agree more. Not sure if you looked at the screenshots closely but we already have a powerful web interface for reviewing and sharing interviews and also a way for you to add a picture of the user :) We've also been talking to some folks at Capital One and are huge fans of all the work you've done with Design Thinking in the last few years!
Angel Botto
awesome idea, i love the design and user experience. #upvote
Angad Singh
@vozconciente Thanks so much! Shout out to our phenomenal designer, @jakedoering :)
Tom Bielecki
I don't know why this hasn't been asked yet. For the free plan, what constitutes 3 "Projects"? The terminology here is opaque for a new user. Is a project a recording?
Tom Bielecki
Another question: if I am conducting the interview over the phone, can I still use this app? Would it need to be on speakerphone to work?
Angad Singh
@tombielecki Great question! A project is the same as one interview recording. However, we call it a project since it's much more than just the audio recording. It also includes your bookmarks, comments and the interview guide for questions.
Angad Singh
@tombielecki Another good question. Sadly, Apple doesn't allow us to record phone calls so we'd only be able to record calls if they are on speakerphone.
Coty Beasley
@preetangad - We've worked in the Watson Ecosystem for a bit and this is one of the coolest applications I've seen to date. User research is always a pain to break it down into useful takeaways - plus I see this crazy useful for client meetings as well. I signed up, but didn't see a freeform area to mention PH. I've got a new project starting up and would love to put this through some experimentation. Thanks!
Angad Singh
@beacrea @sergiomajluf @jonathanzwhite @brandonxoliver @trgorczynski 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 :)
Constantijn Seys
Will this work for focus groups as well? Transcribing these sessions takes ages.
Angad Singh
@seysconstantijn Great question! It should in theory work with transcribing any conversation, as long as people aren't talking over each other. The problem I foresee with focus groups specifically is that in a bigger group, the microphone might not be able to hear everyone clearly. The iPhone microphone has its limits and the volume needs to be moderately high for the transcription to detect it.
David Carpe
I can easily imagine use cases outside of design. for example, I was a main researcher on several of the original "behind the code" shows from msft channel 9 - an awesome series. when I was doing these, I conducted a series of circa 7-12 very long interviews (often 2-3 hours each, though my interview with Gordon bell was more like 5 hours!)...so a couple of questions and comments: 1) awesome feature set! 2) is there any known time limit? 3) is there a way to export and archive audio (imaging unforeseen legal needs for unfettered access or distribution off your servers) 4) is there built in recording disclosure? meaning: several states have quite real laws about notification of recordings (some services beep every two minutes to remind, others have initial statement of consent etc) nice work!
Angad Singh
@passingnotes Thanks for the great comment and the compliments! We haven't tested it with very long recordings yet but I don't see a reason why we wouldn't be able to record, transcribe and store very long interviews. Storage and transcription of audio files is a non-trivial cost so that would be the only barrier but we would love to help you design a plan that meets your needs. Could you send us a message using the Contact Us form on the site? We do allow users to export the raw audio files for editing and sharing anywhere. However, storing them on Cassette lets you use all the other awesome features including timestamped transcripts, revisiting bookmarks, powerful search and zero-overhead collaboration, so we hope you'll stay for those. Would adding something like public key encryption make you more comfortable? As designers, we encourage all users to ask their interviewees explicitly for permission to record beforehand. We've even included a script that they can use to explain why they need to record. However, we don't have any explicit disclosures like beeps etc at the moment. I was not aware of the legal requirements but we'll look into it.