Yellow™ Lab Blog

We’re listening – seriously!

There are 2 ways in we which try and build things that make Yellow Lab better for you. The first is via feedback through the website and blog. We try and answer this feedback reasonably quickly and sometimes ask our own questions back so that we can understand your feedback better. We keep an eye on this feedback and try and pick tends or regularly requested features – which in turn get a higher priority.

Feedback link in footer

Secondly we conduct reasonably regular user testing. The user testing can take different formats, but usually it’s either trying out some ideas in the form of paper prototyping (seeing which solutions users like best before building it) or giving newly developed features a test run to see if there are any problems. We recruit users for user testing from outside the company so that we can be sure they won’t be biased towards our business goals. We also have our own sexy Design Lab where we conduct the user testing. The Design Lab is set up with cameras, computers and even one-way glass so people can watch without disrupting the session.

Internal view of Sensis Design Lab

Observation room in Sensis Design Lab

Obviously we have some business goals we need to work on, but we are also working on things that you think are important too. As Dr Frasier Krane said, “… I’m listening”, so keep that feedback coming!

Cheers,
Dan.

A quick guide to the Yellow™ Lab blog

This blog will cover a variety of topics, but you might not be interested in all of them. To help you out, we’ll use a few different categories so that you can target the posts that you’re most interested in. Here’s a quick explanation of the categories we’ll use:

Site updates: Pretty much what it sounds like. We’ll give you a quick run down of what we’ve done in the latest update to the site.

UX: UX stands for User Experience. This is a broad term that covers things on the site that you interact with directly. It can range from simple interface designs decisions like why something is on the left rather than the right, all the way to more complex ideas such as user defined (location) search areas.

Dev: Short for developer, the Dev category is for all the techies out there that interested in the ‘behind the scenes’ workings. There’ll be posts ranging from how we’re using the FAST search engine, to how we’re going with developing on Rails. It’s hard to tell from the surface, but there are some tricky technical challenges for our developers.

Search: The site is for finding businesses, so search is at its heart. In this category we’ll be talking about search algorithms and how we’re measuring search quality – without giving away company secrets of course!

Features: Most likely this category will be paired with one of the others mentioned above, but essentially it’ll talk specifically about features you get to try out (but you probably already guessed that…)

Hopefully that helps you focus on the posts you care most about. We also hope that means you’ll join in with some discussion when we do post, after all, we want to hear what you think about our ideas.

Cheers,
Dan.