“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

If you are a smart phone user, you must have complained about the design of an App that is contradicted to the principles of User Experience (UX) design(even though you might now know what it is). On the contrary, as an App developer, you probably never figure out why the design of the App does not satisfy UX. Well…if one of the complaints is from your client who pay you to develop, all you can do is to “adjust it”……maybe again and again.

NeverWorker is here to end the awkward gap between App developers and users. Their goal is to develop a tool that developers can easily see how users use their apps, and UXTesting is the answer. UXTesting is an analysis tools to test user experience on Apps, and so far, over 70 Apps, with total over 100 million downloads, have been cooperating with NeverWorker for this analysis tool. The founders of NeverWorker are Aldrich, REX and David, and due to the opportunity to participate RISE Conference in Hong Kong with Aldrich, PunNode was able to know more about the story of NeverWorker.

Aldrich moved to Hong Kong after few years’ experiences as a legal counsel in Taiwan. Knowing his presentation and social skills, Aldrich worked in a Singaporean company that focuses on assisting clients with company establishments. The experience allowed Aldrich to meet many startup companies, but meanwhile, he also wondered whether the life of endless networking with clients is truly his career plan. He moved back to Taiwan after one year in Hong Kong, and joined a Taiwanese startup newly merged by a major telecom as a Business Development manager. There he met the other NeverWorker co-founder REX, a back-end engineer, in the company. The third co-founder, David, is an iOS developer, and already started his business with 5 published Apps in the market. Despite the ability of developing Apps, David considered his team not strong enough on the business side. After knowing Aldrich and REX in a meetup hosted by InstALL App Industrial Developer, three of them decided to start a new business together.

NeverWorker is officially registered in September 2014, and started the operation in December 2014. In David’s experience, he knows that UX plays a key factor for a great App, and thus he always had his prototype Apps to be tested by users first beforehand. Because of the inefficient process to get feedback from users, David decided to develop an analysis tool of UX. UX analysis tool is important in Apps development market in Aldrich’s view, too. When Aldrich was in Beijing as an exchange student, his 2 roommates who major in User Interface (UI) design, both joined video game companies later. Aldrich learned from them that video game companies in China put a lot of effort on marketing research. For example, in order to understand user, a video game companies’ strategy is to create a transparent room for users and recorded every facial expression on users when they play the game, and the company is able to understand users feedback through their experiences. The lesson motivated Aldrich to develop their product, UXTesting.

UXTesting was launched in May 8, 2015 after about 5 months-long efforts on developing the product. “We were struggling at the beginning of the product development. We have to decide which is the best way for users and how the tools should be used, but after all the challenges, we eventually presented our product named UXTesting”.

The main functions of UXTesting include:

1. User Testing Video: In prototype evaluation process, UXTesting is able to get the feedback from user’s facial expressions, postures and touch manners.

2. Crash Playback: The crash replay allows Apps developers to figure out what users have done to cause problems in App by watching the video playback.

3. Heat Map: Apps developers can learn what design in the App is useless by heat map detection.

4. User Flow Chart: Apps developers are able to know which pages are most visited by users, and how users proceed with the App.

“UXTesting is an platform that App developers can choose either blind tests or tests with user’s acknowledge, or even A/B test to find out the most adequate method to adjust their App development,” said by Aldrich, “UXTesting is open to both Android and iOS developers and also provides its service globally.” Although currently clients are mostly from Taiwan, NeverWorker is aiming to promote their product into the world. After the boot camp held by Taiwan Startup Stadium, the team immediately applied to enter into the U.S. Startup Accelerator and is planning to move to the U.S. after successfully enrollment so that they would have a better chance to explore the global Apps developers’ market. Currently, most Taiwanese clients are from universities including NTUST, NTUT, cellphone manufacturers and game companies. “Some companies does not know the importance of Apps’ testing until they know how UXTesting works,” said by Aldrich proudly.

The investments of NeverWorker mostly come from three co-founders. The team has not actively looking for VCs, but would love to share more details with angels who are interested in them. They were awarded the championship at an Apps development competition “Guarding Taiwan: Open Data & Open Source Disaster Prevention App Challenge” co-hosted by Microsoft and g0v in March 2015, which demonstrates their ability to build a nice app. If you are one of App developers who try to improve the App’s quality, UXTesting is probably what you are looking for!

中文版連結

• 別在黑箱裡微調了！UXTesting 讓開發者「看到」用戶到底怎麼用 App