Ceci Mourkogiannis
@cecimetropolis · Founder, @Pie
I'm inspired by this team's commitment to solving problems faced by millions every day. I'd love to hear more about how you developed and tested the product during your beta.
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Thibault Duchemin
@t_duchemin · CEO @AvaScribe - Beyond barriers
@cecimetropolis great question!
first we had to learn how to communicate super effectively with about 40% of our early users, who were Deaf: we learnt ASL - it was easier for me than for Pieter, who self-taught in 3 months from scratch :)
we tend to have a few key principles we believe in, pick a few very important features we want to build, and try to really focus on nailing the experience.
key principles:
1. We go for distributed: because our system is made of everyone's devices, it forces us to want to design the most seamless way of connecting everyone with this constraint. For example, we have no account creation if you're hearing and join the first conversation, or that it takes a tap to connect 2 people on Ava already
2. Designing for very non-tech savvy people: there's all ages, deafness being sort of randomly distributed. We always have them in mind
3. Focus on the core functionality
Regarding the testing, we made a Slack community with deaf/hard-of-hearing users (so tech-savvy feedback) and kept testing also face to face with normal users, look at their behavior, etc.
We don't have a lot of features right now, but they should work well. For example, saving transcripts isn't something we do. We could, but what matters right now is to nail the actual following of the conversation :)
Hope this helps!
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