

Delight.io (YC W10) Lets Developers See What Beta Users Are Doing In Their Apps - thomaspun
http://www.techcrunch.com/2012/07/05/delight-io/

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steve8918
This unfortunately sounds like something that can get people into a lot of
trouble. It's a lot like the Carrier IQ debacle last year, where diagnostic
software was left on some cell phones, and everyone went apeshit over it.

All it takes is for a single customer to leave the software on there and have
it get distributed to their customers, and it might turn into a big privacy
scandal all over again, with not only the customer but this company being
dragged in front of Congress.

I would suggest adding code into your library that either forces a pop-up or
gives a message saying that the app is currently using your software, so that
it warns developers using your code that it's still activated, before they
send it off the the App Store. The last thing you want is for this to get
accidentally installed by unsuspecting end-users.

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iosnoob
This happens all the time on the web as best practice. Don't see how mobile is
different, especially when they seem to have the privacy options built in.

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tijs
I'm not sure recording a video of the user going through her private data on
an app is the same as seeing where she clicks on your website though. As far
as i know services like Clicktale will record mouse interaction but not the
actual data on the screen which makes a huge difference.

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soup10
Watching people use the app in person is super important for design decisions.
You can see their reactions, ask them questions, and generally just get way
more information than you could from a video capture.

I could see tech like this being useful for submitting with bug reports or
something? It's a hard sell though, seems a bit like overkill. You need to
have decent testers that will use it, gotta deal with big video files, their's
privacy concerns and capturing video will eat up cpu/resources and slow down
the app.

So again, potentially useful, but I don't think they've made a good case for
why it's worth the hassle.

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hkyeti
We're implementing Delight in addition to usability groups and testers (and
all the usual analytics). I won't replace having people give you their
qualitative feedback, but being able see where real users get stuck in your UI
is incredibly valuable...

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nchlswu
I've been looking for a solution like this for usability testing and the only
comparable solution I found was screen recording that was restricted to
jailbroken iOS devices which lead me to believe screen recording was one of
those areas that was restricted by Apple.

If this feature or a similar one was added to an app (turned on via user
consent or otherwise), would Apple approve it? This is limited to one app and
essentially another analytics plugin.

Of course, this isn't a big deal if you're only testing a beta in restricted
sessions (and the headline explicitly mentions beta users) but the potential
for this in real world testing is huge.

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thomaspun
Current version of Delight uses all public API. There are already a few apps
shipped with Delight.

And we agree with you that being able to see real user interaction gives us
tons of insights.

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tijs
This would be very much illegal in Europe if used beyond just the test phase
of an app. And even during testing it could only used with active consent of
the tester probably.

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xoail
I can see this fly when troubleshooting bug reports. But I would like to see a
way to turn it on/off with user action. If a user emails me a bug report, I
would like him/her to follow up steps to turn video 'on' so that it can
capture the experience and turn it 'off' once done. And may be also include
the user's identification so that I can filter out on the dashboard...
congrats though!

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thomaspun
Thanks!.

That's a great idea. It is possible with starting and stopping Delight
manually.
([http://www.delight.io/api/Classes/Delight.html#task_Starting...](http://www.delight.io/api/Classes/Delight.html#task_Starting%20and%20Stopping%20Recording))
You can also use [Delight setPropertyValue:forKey:] to include custom property
to the recording so you can access them thru search on our dashboard. Custom
property is any key value pair.

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jawngee
Love this. I've been doing more and more "experiential retailing" stuff with
iPads (and giant perceptive pixel panels in openframeworks/c++), so this would
be awesome to see actual app usage happening in-store. How does it deal with
recording iPad 3 retina size? Is there any impact to performance?

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thomaspun
Thanks! We always resize before recording. Yes there is some performance
impact but users shouldn't see any noticeable UI impact as all capturing and
encoding are done on a background thread.

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tijs
Does this mean your not limiting use of delight to the testing phase but also
allowing it to be used 'in the wild'?

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thomaspun
Here is a sample recording of Delight in action:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWv4iOF3-3Q>

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eps
I'm genuienly curious how many beta users would actually agree to being
recorded this way? Unless it's founder's mom and best friends.

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polyfractal
People do this all the time on the web - see CrazyEgg or Inspectlet.

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jamesjyu
and even more relevant is ClickTale.

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ammmir
does anything similar exist for native mac apps? i'm building a music player
and would love an integrated solution for tracking activity, crashes, etc.

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thomaspun
Not that I know of. There is <http://silverbackapp.com> but it does not do
remote recording.

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Girak
great UX comes from feedbacks of test users. this definitely helps the
designers to learn user behavior and make changes accordingly.

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liveink
love it, even works for unity -> ios projects!

