I’ve been posting at the Artsy engineering blog, most recently about how we trick ourselves into sharing end users’ experiences:
…we stole a page from the agile development handbook and built an information radiator. Like a kanban board, news ticker, or analytics wall board, our information radiator gives us an ambient awareness of end users’ experiences. How?
It’s our site, as a slideshow.
That’s all. Our wall-mounted display shows the same web page that a visitor to our site recently requested. Every 20 seconds, it refreshes and shows a new, more recently requested page.
Without much effort, this gives us a sense of where users spend time on the site (nudes seem popular today). The impact of events such as email blasts or celebrity mentions is immediately apparent (did @aplusk just tweet us?). And when problems happen, we notice them as soon as errors pop up on the screen (AWS down again?).
Check out the full post.