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First potential user check
Posted by Rene Jansen
As a reality check, we had our first "potential user review" last Thursday. We spoke with Hans de Graaff (you might know him from his excellent index on human computer interaction and his work for SIGCHI).Hans and I go back quite some time, since we initiated MMUIS about 10 years ago. MMUIS used to be a group of PhD students, having bi-monthly meetings on topics like Multimedia, User interfaces and information retrieval. Since we are all graduated these days, MMUIS still exists as a group of friends :-)
However, when Hans learned about bPerform, he sent me an email saying he had some thoughts on next generation e-mail and time management himself. He embraced a time management approach called "getting things done" from David Allen some time ago, and he is very enthusiastic about following a good time management philosophy: "it gives you a much more relaxed feeling".
So, we found ourselves last Thursday, drinking a lot because of the heat wave (very rare in the Netherlands), discussing our sketches for bPerform. Hans was pretty enthusiastic about our approach, making statements like "this is LinkedIn as it was meant to be" (LinkedIn is a pretty popular social software solution for business environments, pretty much equal to OpenBC) and "good to see there are people working on the MS Outlook of tomorrow".
Although we planned to talk for an hour, we got so enthusiastic that we spend over two hours in our office discussing the pro's and con's of our approach. Then we decided to continu our discussions in the pleasant city center of Delft, in the sun, having beer and some food. His comments were very valuable, and we will take his comments seriously to further improve our design.
His final conclusion was that he would definitely consider to use bPerform as soon as it is available. This first reality check with an "outsider" gave us confidence for the following sessions with potential users, planned for the next two weeks.