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p/ribbon-4On-demand user interviews with your own users - for free
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Ben Lang

Ribbon - On-demand user interviews with your own users - for free

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On-demand & instant video interviews with your own users. Ribbon is a user interviewing platform that lets designers, user researchers and product builders start video calls with their own users in minutes.

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Ryan Hoover
This is a smart idea. Curious what's next on the roadmap, @axel_thomson?
Axel Thomson
Maker
Great question @rrhoover! We’re adding screen sharing next week (to allow for easier usability testing) and then call recordings just after that (so that user researchers can rewatch calls whenever they want to, with permission from the end users). After that we’ll look at adding support for triggering calls from other events than just page load (to make it easier to get feedback from users that interact with specific website elements or enter an A/B test). Longer term we want to make it easy to do good and quicker user research regardless of your platform and what you want to know about your users, so we’re keen to add support for iOS & Android apps as well.
Axel Thomson
Maker
@rrhoover Due to popular demand we've fast-tracked the ability to trigger the invite pop-up through a simple JavaScript function as well, so you can now recruit users for interviews based on any behaviour (such as clicking a specific button or hovering over an element). It's now live on the site, hope it's of use!
Axel Thomson
Maker
@rrhoover We've now added screen sharing functionality to allow for usability testing as well! You can currently screen share from desktop devices on Firefox and Chrome, and we'll add support for other supported browsers as well in the next weeks.
Axel Thomson
Maker
👋 Hey Hunters, and thanks to @benln for hunting us! Ribbon is a user research platform that makes it easy for people who build websites and do user research to set up and run remote video user interviews in a matter of minutes. Get user feedback directly, and validate your design, product or idea more quickly by talking to real users. Why Ribbon? As a product manager I've booked, managed and run user interviews to test out both smaller features and larger products. Every time I've wanted to understand how a product was used and perceived by our users, I've had to to either rely on quantitative data (surveys and analytics) or spend days emailing users to schedule video interviews. I've built Ribbon to make it easy for people who build products and do user research to connect and talk to their users in minutes instead of days. I realise not every product has a lot of revenue, but getting good feedback is just as important in the early days, so I've made Ribbon free to get started with. Hope you like it!
James Futhey
This looks awesome! Great idea. Question: Can I schedule the user interview? I think for small websites / makers doing it "right now" is an advantage for everyone involved. But, for professional researchers or teams my goal would be "Great! Let's pick a time that works for you and you can come back to the site, everything will be ready for you". Even if it's just a calendly link and I have to manually press the button when the user comes back 😅
Axel Thomson
Maker
@futhey Good question! Currently it’s not optimised for pre-scheduling (although you can customise what message your users see in the popup and add a Calendly link there). I’ve seen this need come up frequently so we’re looking at adding that functionality by mid-November. I’ll let you know once it’s in place!
Minjie Shi
This is a great concept! After a quick tour of the app, I think it will be good to have the control regarding who can see the invite pop-up. As an example, I might set a trigger to show the invite whenever the user leaves the pricing page. So that I can initiate a conversation with that user to understand what went wrong and what additional information they would need. The quicker I can get to that customer after he/she has made the decision, I believe, the answer is more accurate. I could certainly see myself using Ribbon for this kind of use case in the future.
Axel Thomson
Maker
@minjie_shi Thanks for the feedback! You’re absolutely right, right now the pop-up loads on page load, but we want to make it easy to contact users (in a non-intrusive way) after any relevant action/event so we’re looking at adding a basic version of that functionality by the end of November. Will definitely let you know once that is in place!
Axel Thomson
Maker
@minjie_shi Hi Minjie, we've now added the ability to control exactly when you want the pop-up to appear, and you can now choose if you want it to appear when the page loads or by calling a simple JavaScript function. This should make the platform a lot more useable as you can now choose exactly what behaviour should trigger an invite. The functionality is now live on the platform, and I'll write up a short doc to outline how to set it up over the next few days. Will let you know once it's ready! Hope it's of use and let me know if you have any more feedback!
Minjie Shi
@axel_thomson Thanks for following up with me and you guys work fast! Unfortunately I am not too familiar with JS so I probably need to work on that a bit more. If possible, I am keen to see some examples of those in your short doc.
Cathy Sanders
Interesting project. But can you tell me please, what if my phone or laptop is infected with spying apps that can record my calls. I speak about such apps http://celltrackingapps.com. is this research paltform protected from such hacking tools?
Nastya Mikeyeva
Hi @axel_thomson , Do users call to the app owners or app owners call to web users?
Axel Thomson
Maker
Hey @mikeyeva, as the website owner you start a call, and the website users who land on the website will then see a discrete notification inviting them to the call until a user has either joined or the owner stops the call. So the owner calls the user :)
Liam Dunne
This seems really useful, well done. Gaining user feedback is a never-ending initiative.
Axel Thomson
Maker
@liam_d it really is! I found that all the admin needed to set up user interviews resulted in us doing less user research overall (and having less headspace for other things), so hopefully Ribbon can help other teams who are in a similar situation!
Nitin Gupta
OTG video calling,nice ribbon, kudos to team
Axel Thomson
Maker
Thanks @n_g_29! Hope it’s of use!
Gabriel Ruttner
Great concept! At what size (DAU) have you seen this provide the most impact?
Axel Thomson
Maker
@gaberuttner That’s a good question. I’d relate the impact more to research team size than DAU (although I’m sure they are often correlated). The problem of admin work slowing down user research exists at most company scales. Larger companies such as FAANG tend to have dedicated research ops teams that help take the burden of organising interviews from the user researchers themselves, and tend to have the resources to solve their problems in-house. In small-medium sized companies the research teams are usually smaller and and more of the admin work of booking interviews has to be done by the researchers themselves. These small-medium sized teams so far have been the most interested in finding a solution to this problem.
Lorenzo Bellucci
Congrats Axel! Keep up the good work - Happy to chat further
Axel Thomson
Maker
@lorenzo_bellucci1 Thanks Lorenzo, looking forward to keeping chatting!
Jane Shircliff
Have you plans to add any kind of screener so one knows something about who you will be talking to and whether you want to talk to them? So, behaviour based insights to id areas and/or users of interest plus questions to user for further fine-tuning/optimizing the value of the interview plus scheduling interviews? Or perhaps integrating with other existing services for that level of detail?
Axel Thomson
Maker
@jane_shircliff Great question! We've just launched the ability to customise when the invitation pop-up gets triggered, so you can now decide yourself (by calling a simple JavaScript function) when you want to invite a user. For example, if you're A/B testing different versions of a button you could choose to only trigger the popup when users press that button. We're also looking at how we can add extra controls for customising who you recruit for an interview, and pre-screening questions are definitely one of the top candidates for doing that. I'll let you know once we've made a call on when we put something like pre-screening questions! Let me know if you have any more questions or feedback, really interesting to get your input.
Patrick Gaskin
Really cool idea. Lots of applications are coming to mind. Congrats!
Axel Thomson
Maker
@patrick_gaskin Thanks Patrick, good to hear it's of use!
Elizabeth Dlha
What a great idea! I've been looking for something to streamline the overhead around user interviews for ages, can't wait to try this out!
Axel Thomson
Maker
@alzbeta_dlha Glad you like it!
Anthony Emberley
This is awesome! I can also see a use case for live support with users that have a question and would prefer face-to-face rather than live chat
Axel Thomson
Maker
@anthony_emberley Glad it's resonating! The live support use case is really interesting for sure. Right now we're focused on making it easy to get feedback from the user to the user researcher/product builder, but would be interesting to explore how that type of feedback could flow in both directions in the future.
Dmitry Drobyshev
Great product. Good luck, guys!
Axel Thomson
Maker
@itnon Thanks Dmitry, much appreciated!