Customer Development Platform
Objective: creation of a web-based platform to invite, manage, solicit feedback from and provide feedback to alpha or beta testers of a web based user experience or user interface project.
Problem to be solved is:
– to be able to control, measure, and evolve the experience testers have when trying out a feature or set of features in a mockup or a real site.
Requirements
1. the mockup is built using an external design tool that can export to html, such as pidoco or similar
2. testers use the actual html export of the mockup
a. this platform should be able to access that html export at a given and changeable url
3. each piece of feedback must be time-stamped and associated with a specific mockup page
a. ideally there is a way to drop a pin on the page that points to the specific object on the page for which the feedback applies
4. the mockup creation process and the feedback mechanism must be independent, hence the html export being the bridge
5. the platform should allow the ability to track groups of users tied to specific sub-goals for a user test i.e. subsets of the html export
Proposed approach to solving the problem
1. use WP as a base for capturing feedback, managing users, taking metrics etc
2. develop a WP plugin or PHP code that crawls the whole html export and creates a post for each page crawled
3. develop a WP post template that reads the URL in its body and loads it in an iframe or similar
4. develop a WP plugin that listens to the iframe URL and loads the corresponding post created in 2.