Each week I’ll be conducting an interview that highlights a different user on our site to better understand who our community is, how Pinyadda fits into their lives, and what they like most and think could be better about the product. It’s part of our customer discovery and validation process, and we’re excited to take the learnings and make Pinyadda better. We’re calling it “No User Left Behind.”

A serious need for information

The first user I interviewed is Rob Gonzalez, a Senior Project Manager for Endeca Technologies. Endeca is a leading search application technology company in Cambridge, Mass. that powers 250M+ people to more quickly and easily access information. He started in an engineering role and moved quickly up the ranks to Senior Project Manager. In this role, he plans future releases, meets with both customers and partners, evaluates 3^rd party technologies, and more generally is responsible for anything Endeca does in the ETL space from technology to sales. So, he has what he describes as “a serious need for information from a variety of sources to stay on top of my game.”

To stay on top of the information and breaking news in this context, Rob currently uses a plethora of tools: FeedBurner, Reddit, Google Alerts and general search. He also emails and discusses links on a daily basis, and subscribes to a bunch of newsletters. For him, these various outlets pose a problem – what he describes as a “multi-tool” problem. It’s a pain for him to visit all these outlets to stay up to date on his industry, so he often just skips the process if he doesn’t have time.

Pinyadda as a solution: What the iPhone did for mobile

Pinyadda solves a lot of these problems for Rob by “consolidating the values” of these various sites and platforms into one place.  He describes Pinyadda solving what the iPhone did for mobile and mp3 players: “instead of carrying an RSS reader and email client and web browser around for my news, I can just use one site.”

Always stretched for time, he likes that he can come to Pinyadda, easily see headlines, click through on a few articles and get on with his life. He also appreciates the efficientcy of not having to log into another application like Facebook, Twitter, or an email client to share what articles are most pressing to his job with his colleagues.

A lurker, but also a discoverer

While he notes he’s a “lurker” on Pinyadda, checking in on what other people are reading, I was excited when he noted his favorite feature was the Topics feed. This is generally the feed we see users finding value in after they’ve “lurked” a bit. He akins Topics to some of he keywords he uses in Google Alerts. This is great learning for us, and a use case we hadn’t prominently thought about. It certainly puts more momentum behind a feature on our product roadmap – the idea of building saved searches into your topic feed to follow more obscure or specific topics.

My new favorite user, because he has great ideas and isn’t afraid to provide specific critiques

Rob is candid. We love that. Viewing Pinyadda as a tool, he has lots of ideas of some changes he would like to see that could add a lot of immediate value to the product.

1. The Pin, everywhere on the web. Rob wants to be able to click the Pin It icon from anywhere on the web to share his article recommendations, without having to login to Pinyadda. Easily sharing and recommending information is important to us. Awesome idea.
2. Pinyadda on the go.  Rob wants Pinyadda on the plane. He even offered up a solution of using Google Gears to help make this happen. Another awesome idea.
3. RSS integration. An avid FeedReader user (and complainer of it’s limitations), this is what Rob wants most. He sees tremendous opportunity in making the switch from an RSS reader like Google Reader to Pinyadda frictionless by providing users a simple one-click import of all of their feeds. He also described the way we allow users to add sites as his “biggest annoyance.”

The feedback on #3 is particularly important to us. We realize we can’t grow our index without our community’s help. Accordingly, Rob reiterated that we need to make it easier for them to help with this. As structured now, even for someone familiar with RSS, it can be difficult to add your own feeds. I can imagine what it’s like for someone not familiar with RSS.

Engineer by nature, Rob offered some specifics on how we might consider making the process better. For example, simply entering the site’s URL instead of having to search for a site’s RSS feed. We’re going to look into solutions for this, and welcome ideas from others who may have ideas about how to make this happen. Having encountered a few RSS submission failures, such as with Atom feeds, we’re currently working diligently on accepting all flavors of RSS (thanks for bearing with us!).  He also offered a good perspective on how to make the “flow” of adding a site a lot easier — such as adding his own topic tags — and we couldn’t agree more. We’d like to give more credit to the users who are adding knowledge and great sites to the platform and make the flow, in general, more fun. Allowing our community to create their own tags, for example, will allow everyone to receive more personalized content and have more control.

Rob, again, thank you for being so candid with us and for your perspective as a “multi-tool” user! Looking forward to looping back with you on your feedback as we rollout new features.

If you’d like to follow Rob’s article and blog post recommendations on Pinyadda, here are the top 3 topics I’d recommend following him on:

1. Semantic web
2. Software
3. Strategy

Tags: customer, No User Left Behind, Pinyadda

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Yadda Squad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.