Stories
Stories from the work
People who hired a session study, a map, or a readout. The comments name the stretch of the app and the awkward part of working with us.
We sent evening grocery sessions from a week in Butterworth. The memo did not flatter us. It listed how often the card form stole focus after the guest rotated the phone. I used two timestamps in a meeting with payments and nobody asked for a chart.
The path map looked messy because the visits were messy. Guests left the clinic booking to check a WhatsApp message, came back, and landed on a doctor list that had reshuffled. Jia Wen refused to draw a tidy line through that. The printed sheet is still on our wall.
I wanted the readout to skip the slow clips. Farah would not. She opened with a four-minute pause on the transfer confirmation. My finance partner was annoyed at the time of day we chose — late Thursday — and said so. The room still heard the pause.
Our staff talked over every clip on day one. By the third half-day they were arguing about a keyboard switch instead of inventing a mood for the guest. I wish we had booked fewer people; eight is loud in that room.
A longer account: the grocery checkout
Nadia’s team already knew the payment step leaked baskets. They did not know whether people left because of a bank page, a keyboard, or a delivery slot that expired while they typed.
We locked 32 weekday-evening sessions. Three were internal testers; those left the sample after Farah recognised a staff email on a receipt screen. The remaining 29 showed a pattern that was almost dull: the card form refocused when the phone tilted, the CVV field cleared, and the guest retyped. Six guests then opened a banking app and never returned inside the sample window.
The memo recommended nothing about “redesign.” It recommended watching the tilt behaviour on two device families the team actually ships, and checking whether the delivery slot clock runs during the bank visit. Nadia’s group did that work themselves. We were not in those later meetings.
A longer account: the clinic loop
Dr. Ong asked for a map, not a memo. The sample was smaller (18 sessions) and bilingual. Arun marked six visits where the guest typed a name in Malay in a field that only accepted a particular romanisation. The map shows a loop through “edit profile” that nobody on the clinical side had seen, because they test with their own names.
We still owe them nothing beyond the sheet. If they later want a full study, that is a new intake — the map is not a discount voucher.