On Thursday last week team wishli.st (aka. Dave and I) spent a day in the truly brilliant Cluny pub in Newcastle, learning more about how people use our facebook application.

In exchange for a beer of their choice we asked people to spend a few minutes playing with our Facebook app, and chat about presents.  We used Silverback to record their screen (and their face) whilst they were clicking away and will use these films to make the next round of changes to the app.

To get the word out about the event we relied on our Twitter account (and a “FREE BEER!” sign in the pub), so a big thank you to @TimLangley, @geekestdrink, @alncl and @emiliaf for the retweets.

The day had it’s own chaos (wifi a bit flaky – Mac users if your wireless connection times out in The Cluny try this), but once we got started, people came in thick and fast.  Thanks to Emily and Katie from BluMilk for putting up with our shaky start (and for the chips!).

Thanks to Tristan from Tasty Development for rounding a  few people up, and to Matt for letting me interrupt dinner with his brother and girlfriend (and for some amazing feedback too).

We ended up with the inimitable @Wildheart_Baby, who not only taught us about the subtleties of DVD boxset shopping but also showed off some amazing swag from Gowalla.

A few hours of video footage later and we’ve got our next set of development tasks lined up!

Katie picks her friends, lucky Emily

Wildheart_baby hard at work testing