It’s been a few weeks since the last entry. Picking the series back up with a weekend and a Monday worth of Magellink work.

What I shipped

Over the weekend I built the first version of a feature I’d been circling for a while: upload a one-page HTML prototype, the kind you get out of Claude or similar tools in minutes, let real end users click through it, and record what they do.

The ARD conversation

Today I pitched it to the UX research lead at ARD, Germany’s public broadcaster. He was interested, and the reason he gave me was more useful than the interest itself.

ARD runs a lot of quantitative research and some qualitative research, but nothing in between. No way to watch a hundred people react to a prototype the way you’d watch five people in a lab.

What’s still open

Five things came up that I don’t have good answers for yet:

  1. Recruiting. ARD’s own site can’t run third-party recruiting tools, so participants have to come from somewhere else.
  2. Recording face and audio, not just clicks and timing, while someone works through a prototype.
  3. Goal states and success criteria. What “done” means for a given task, defined per prototype.
  4. Monetary incentives for participants.
  5. A research pool. Keeping people who’ve completed a session around so they can be invited back.

Tomorrow

Starting with recruiting and task/success states: get the right people in front of a prototype, watch them try to do something specific, learn whether they could. The rest only matters once that holds up.

Also filming a LinkedIn video relaunching Magellink around this feature.