As tech companies battle it out to bring new, innovative products to market that will have mass appeal and generate healthy income streams, some go to great lengths to test concepts before they are rolled out.
Case in point: Google and its “drunk test.”
The idea of the drunk test was pitched by a now former employee who realized Google’s tech-savvy, engineer-heavy staff might not always be able to separate themselves from their own “nerdy” biases when testing new product concepts, according to Business Insider.
Examples of products employees thought would have wide appeal include Google Plus and Google Wave. While these products did rate well with highly technical individuals, both didn’t necessarily have the mass appeal Google had hoped for. As a result, both, more or less, flopped.
To combat the in-house innate bias in hopes of creating products with more widespread appeal, the former employee encouraged his designers to knock back a few beers while trying out new products, he told Business Insider.
The move, he said, enabled designers to more readily set aside their own assumptions about the complexity of products and view them as average users might.
The problem another former employee, Lars Rasmussen, explained to Business Insider was that sometimes it’s easy to forget products are being built for the masses and not everyone on the planet works and processes information like a Googler, nor do many want to.
“You were building tools for yourself,” Rasmussen explained.
Aside from in-house bug testing, Google also frequently reaches out to its users for product-testing studies and also to test the user friendliness of existing products.
The company actively advertises the need for participants on its “Google User Experience Research Studies” page.
Users who sign up to help test products are asked to provide their feedback on new products, existing products, new features and prototypes. In exchange for trying out products and delivering their honest feedback, users receive a “token” of Google’s appreciation.
Google stresses user feedback is wanted from a wide variety of people, including non-Google product users. Input, the website states, doesn’t have to come from a “tech aficionado” to be valuable. Interested volunteers can sign up on Google’s website at any time to be matched with an appropriate study when one crops up.
While it’s unclear just how extensive Google’s use of the employee-pitched “drunk test” happens to be, it is clear the company is making efforts to ensure products and features have appeal beyond Googlers themselves.
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