I’m a big fan of the HBO tech satire Silicon Valley. If you work in tech, advertising, or marketing you will immediately be sucked into the real life scenarios the show highlights every week. From VC funding to burndown charts and runways, the show does a fairly accurate job of capturing the feeling of working at a start-up. Season 3 serves up a great usability testing example.
If you haven’t seen the show, it focuses on a fictional company called Pied Piper. The goal of Pied Piper’s platform is to provide a compression tool for shrinking data down to the smallest possible size. Think of it as WinZip on steroids.
The platform is portrayed as a revolutionary game changer for the industry. The company wins first prize at TechCrunch Disrupt SF and is immediately besieged by VC companies ready to pour money into the company.
The team, working out of a house in the Valley, works on the platform for months and finally get it far enough along to release a beta version. They send out roughly 50 beta invites to their friends, the majority who happen to be fellow engineers. They only give one invite to a non-engineer — their contact at the VC firm that is currently funding them.
Here’s a screenshot of what the beta user interface looks like:
