Ashish’s World!

I was part of the group that participated in the group discussion on June 2nd that Dina Mehta referred to in her blog. The discussion was around our current communication habits and patterns, Skype usage and then thoughts on a new application that they demo’d. The application, in the current scope, is basically a plugin for Skype which adds a lot more features to the parent application and, essentially, tries to become your ‘personal assistant’.

I will resist the temptation of writing anything more about the application or the client (the company that Dina is helping out with the research) here as they are still in private alpha and it is not fair for me to write about something that might undergo a lot of changes in the coming months. And then my idea of writing this post is, anyways, not to talk about the application but thoughts around the importance of such group discussions and early feedback in the product development.

The group had 5 participants (a couple of business-men, a call-center employee and another software professional) and it was interesting to see the different perspective - some of which I could have never thought myself. I am not sure how much of the feedback will this team incorporate in the product but the exercise definitely helped me by emphasizing on the importance of early feedback in a product development - from a user’s perspective.

Early feedback and incorporating the feedback is always built into the schedule of most project (it also depends on the client, so it can’t be all) that we do at Tekriti. But engaging a professional like Dina to help you with the exercise means taking it to the next level. So, more than anything, I was excited because it helped me at my individual and my organization level.

And, yeah, did I say that I got a chance to meet and interact with Stuart Henshall of Skype Journal fame. That was another highlight, of course - particularly knowing that my thoughts on the future of the application (more than the application - I liked the concept behind it) was well aligned with his.