Building beautiful products

Sharing a test

2 main ways our customers use interviewstreet within their company:

a. Different teams in their organization

b. A technical team to setup programming questions and the HR team which takes care of inviting candidates  

Hence the need for a collaboration feature. As a first step, we're launching the share a test feature which would allow users to share their tests with others in the organization.

How to use?

Every test now has a link to 'share' a test

 

Just enter the e-mail address of the person whom you want to share the test with. That's it.

 

Currently, the person to whom it's shared should be a registered user on our site. We're building the feature (iteration) to share it with non-registered users too. Let us know what you think!  

 

[Feature] Creating a video

As a part of a bunch of experiments we're doing, here's one awesome add-on. We've built a feature that allows our customers to look at the way the candidate has coded. Checkout our sample video here

 

This is an optional feature which you could use. We're iterating on this to make it much better. Ping your thoughts and comments.

Product development quote

"We may not be right, but at least we are not confused"

Bringing this attitude to product development greatly enhances the way the product turns up                                           

Lesson #0: Make the user do less work

If there's something on your site that can either be prefilled or autosaved, please do. For eg: if you are going to ask details from the user like country, city, zipcode, etc. try to auto-fill the zipcode, detect IP address and prefill the country, etc. This is just an example and I'm sure you can find more such instances in your site where you can show your code is intelligent enough to make the user lazier.

I think web users now expect things to be saved automatically (every x seconds) instead of clicking on the Save button everytime. Enhance your javascript code to do this. For example, we do not have a button that does the save functionality when a user edits a test. Everything is auto-saved. Here's a neat little plugin Anand has written that does the functionality. Checkout the example here

 

A simpler way to create a test

We just made a big change to the way tests are created on Interviewstreet. It used to be a boring (now we can say) 4 step process to create and publish a test

An important thing we learnt about building products is the activation energy to move from the existing framework to yours should be very minimal. When we figured out that a lot of people use etherpad (or it's clones) to conduct phone screens, a lot of simplification was needed from our end since we were targeting the same funnel. 

It's amazing how much you learn about your website when you sit before a bunch of guys trying out your product. We did that and boy wasn't it surprising! We've cleared all the clutter and creating a test is just a 1-step process!

 

Product updates

We're going to put up our lessons in building good web apps and product updates here. This serves 2 things

a) Helps us share the lessons

b) Keeps you updated about the product and helps us keep a check on how agile we are!

We would like to create a record number of blog posts here. Stay tuned!