Get Everyone to Listen In

You already know that working with actual customers and users is one of the most powerful things you can do for the experience design of your product. But what if you’re only one of few in your organization benefiting from their words? It’s often difficult to convince your CEO, or anyone, to spend her time listening to customer sessions. Enter iPods, and the ever-present commute period. What a great way to put more of your team members in contact with users by downloading sessions to their iPods! Ask everyone to listen on their way to work, or while walking the dog, or jogging on the treadmill.

(Eric Fain, a product design consultant, put together this set of instructions that you can send folks at your company. He assumes the use of a PC, not a Mac, since that’s what much of corporate America uses.)

If your audio recording is delivered as an MP3 file, it will be as simple as adding a new song to your music library to add it to your iPod or your MP3 player of choice. If you are not familiar with adding specific songs to your iTunes music library, follow these instructions:

• Save the MP3 file to your local hard drive
• From the iTunes file menu choose “Add file to library…” (or you can choose an entire folder to add by choosing “Add folder to library”)
• Locate the file where you saved it on your hard drive and select it and choose “Open”

Note: When you originally do this, the MP3 file is not likely to have additional information carried by music MP3. You can add this in iTunes manually so you can better categorize the file itself. To do this, follow these instructions:

• Locate the file in your iTunes music library listing. It will be listed alphabetically by the filename it was saved as
• Right click on the file name and choose “Get Info”
• Select the Info tab in the pop-up window and type in the information about the file

Adding the files to your iPod takes the same steps you would use to add music to your music library. These vary by your personal settings, but generally speaking you need to add the file to a playlist that is synchronized on your iPod in order to listen to the file there.

If you would like to create a podcast of the audio files that your team members or other colleagues can subscribe to via an RSS feed, follow the instructions at Podcastingnews.com.