Show HN: Ribbon – Video chat with your own users

[oakst]

Hey HN,

I’m Axel, founder of Ribbon (https://tryribbon.com). Ribbon is a user research platform for people who build websites and apps. It allows people who build products to quickly set up video chats with their own users so that they can get a better understanding of who their users are and how their products can be improved.

Here’s a demo of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR-5VNZp8iQ

Working as a product manager I grew frustrated with how hard it was to get a good understanding of who was using my products. Booking in user interviews took up to a day each week of emailing potential participants back and forth to coordinate the interviews, and only gave us access to users who we’re willing to book up their time days in advance.

I built Ribbon to solve this. Ribbon makes it super simple for anyone who runs a website to spin up a video chat with people who are browsing that website in seconds instead of days.

I’d love to hear about any ideas, experiences and feedback you might have!

[eyvindn]

The idea I think is very useful from a UX perspective.

Some questions that immediately hit me:

How will you incentivise users to want to jump on a video chat with a random person? I think some people may be frightened by the thought of a stranger opening a video chat with them?

Currently the video opens full screen. Have you considered having a floating window to allow the user to continue interacting with the website?

Have you considered tracking interactions or even sharing the users screen to allow you, as a UX person, to see what the user is seeing (while talking with them).

Very solid demo! Thanks for sharing.

[oakst]

Some really great points.

Most of the user researchers & research ops people I've spoken with currently use some form of monetary incentive (credit for their own product or cash) to incentivise users to join their user research sessions. This process would work the same with Ribbon, although outside of the platform. In the next few days I'm adding functionality for the interviewer to be able to customise what message users see in the user recruitment pop-up, so that they can let users know about any compensation they will get for their time. In the mid-term another way to make running user research even easier is to help facilitate those payments directly on the platform.

The floating video is a really interesting idea! I've opted for making the script as light as possible, with all of the video chat functionality being hosted on Ribbon. This is to make sure the script doesn't slow down any website it is added to. Further down the line it will be interesting to explore how to make the user journey even more frictionless whilst still keeping website performance top of mind.

Screen sharing is another functionality that's proving really useful in remote user testing. I'm adding that over the coming month!

[patrickjburns]

this looks interesting, but what if you're not there when someone requests a video chat?

[oakst]

Good question, the option to video chat is only shown to your users when you (the owner of the website) indicate that you want to video chat. As soon as you've already found someone to chat with (or you cancel the chat) no other users will see the option to join your video chat.

[patrickjburns]

this looks interesting, but what if you're not around when a user requests video?