I co-founded Trill in the fall of 2014 with the audacious goal of becoming the essential source for high quality, actionable data for the performing arts. We approached this two-sided market from the audence side, focusing on products that would connect audiences with live performances. In the two years we did business, we iterated through four distinct offerings for the consumer market, as well as countless backend tools to help us collect and cleanse a wide variety of live show listings.
The first product we launched was Trill.me, a web database of live shows in Boston. The first few versions don’t really merit a spot in a portfolio — #iykyk — so the work documented here supported a third wave of improvements to the product.
(Check out some other great experiences we worked on like Trill IRL, Trill Tonight, a TEDx installation, and Trill Presents)
In this third redesign of Trill’s initial web product we focused on optimizing for mobile devices, responsive layouts, performance, and user testing. I managed an external development team to complete implementation of this effort.
We put a weekly testing cadence in place inspired by Steve Krug’s concept of DIY usability testing — each Thursday we would dedicate a couple of hours to running 3-5 informal tests with users. Our offices were in lively coworking spaces with an ample supply of our target user, so recruiting often took the form of sending an intern down the halls to meet and greet. We picked a general focus for each week’s series and wrote a script so that anyone in the company could administer. On Fridays we held a post mortem and prioritized three things we could learn or fix from that week’s series. Depending on where we were in a product lifecycle, our tests ranged from surveys or freeform interviews to usability tests with either paper prototypes or live apps.