“If you’re competitor focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer focused allows you to be more pioneering.” 

- Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon

As most of you already know, being customer focused includes having conversations with the people that use your product or service. Not just once…but throughout the entire life of the product or service.

We continue to take this advice and appreciate all the feedback you have given us. We especially want to thank a few people from the 2015 Fall Venture School Cohort: Jon Thompson and Katie Geraty! Thank you both for taking time to give us feedback that will help us improve Handrail for those passionate about creating products and services people love.

If you have feedback or have something you want to share, let us know!

Continued thanks for all your support and if you know anyone that would benefit from using Handrail, send them our way!

- The Handrail Team
Table of Contents:

  1. Startup Spotlight:
    • Swineguard
    • Monday Creations
  2. New Features & Functionality
1. Startup Spotlight
We’re interviewing startups across the country to discover the inspiration for their business, how they conducted user research and what advice they would give others in their startup journey.

For our very first Spotlight, we talked to two very different groups. One is working on product to help pork production and the other is a agency focused on helping businesses evolve their brands.

 
Swineguard-
Saving lives, one piglet at a time!

I sat down with Matt Rooda and Abraham Espinoza with Swineguard to understand their product, how they do user research and what makes them tick.
Read More
Monday Creations-
Design agency for the forward thinking brand
Cody Caraway from Monday Creations took time out of his busy day to talk to us about how they got started, their user research process and advice for other startups.
Read More
Have a startup we should spotlight? Let us know!
2. New features & functionality
Slack Channel

Join us and others in talking about creating products and services people love!

  • Talk about:
    • User Research
    • Usability Testing
    • Feature Requests
    • More!
Updated facilitation features

In our quest to make facilitating test sessions as quick and intuitive as possible, we’ve made a few updates:

  • We changed the text of “Notes” under questions to “Observations”
    • This field allows you to capture interesting things you notice users/interviewees doing
  • Moved session notes that were in-between each question to a fly-out sidebar
    • Used to capture notes or issues not related to the interview.
      • Ex: “p. 6 of prototype is not working”
Update Navigation

We’ve known we needed to update the navigation structure for awhile but now we got a little time to do it!

  • Moved navigation to top level to gain space on the page
  • Removed tab navigation on pages
Next Release

Here’s a little taste of what we plan on releasing next:

  • Enhanced Results
    • Filtering
    • Data grouping by Personas
  • New Question Types
  • Other updates based on user testing!
Have feature requests? Share them on our Trello board.
Have a great week and happy user researching!

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