User friendliness

No such thing as a “user problem”

At Confrere, we believe that there is no such thing as a“user problem.” There are no stupid users and no incompetent customers. If our users encounter any problems, it is likely because we didn’t do a good enough job.

Incomprehensible microcopy, clunky interface elements, and code that isn’t written for the real world - that’s on us. (We conduct a lot of user testing to root out any potential issues.)

Example: Saying goodbye to clumsy video calls

We’ve all had that clumsy video call. "Is my camera on?" "Why can’t I hear you? Is something wrong with my speakers, or is it your microphone?"

Our senior engineer Ingvild Indrebø wanted to take the awkward troubleshooting out of the conversation and solve it with code instead (she has spoken at this at the Berlin.js meetup. She used technologies such as WebRTC, WebAudio and Canvas, to build a user-friendly and accessible tool to make sure you’re all set for your video call.

See the demo of the video call tester.

Here are resources from Ingvild’s talk on the topic, presented at the Berlin.JS JSConf EU Special:

• Canvas
• Samplerate
• webAudio
• fftSize
• frequencyBinCount
• Fourier Transformations
• Meaningful audio visualizations
• How music visualizers work

This is a technical solution to a problem that is often seen as a user problem. We hope it can inspire other developers to also look for ways in which tech can solve problems that seem, at first glance, to be user problems.