Start Me Up! A profile of Lookback

Mobile companies that thrive do so through great user experience. Jonatan Littke, Founder of Lookback, believes design has taken over technology and rightly so.

Yet for all its glory, a lot of design is still being created without knowing how it will be received.

Check out more about Lookback's solution in this Q&A and let us know what you think in the comments...

In one sentence, what is Lookback?

Lookback makes user experience collecting a breeze. We help you to see how people really use your iOS app by giving you the ability to record the screen and the touches of a user, plus the user's face and voice is also recorded, as they interact with you app, all from within your own app with no extra equipment.

What problem does this solve?

Though understanding your users on a quantitative level can be done with several analytics tools out there, understanding users on a qualitative level has always been complex. 

At Lookback we used to say that pretty pixels aren't enough anymore because for quite some time now, everyone has been focusing on design.

Design, design, design, pixels and design. And that's great! So many beautiful pixels have been created.

But how are they used? How are people interacting with the pretty pixels you've built? Do they communicate the intended message? Do they sell? Etc.

So at Lookback we make it easy for any user-centered company to view and understand their users on a whole new level by gathering all the recorded user sessions (or experiences, as we call them) in our web UI where they can be viewed, discussed, tagged and filtered, etc. 

Watching a user interact with your app and speak aloud what they're thinking as they go along is an extremely powerful way of understanding what needs to be improved in your app.

And it's something we'd like for everyone to experience, not just the ones that can afford expensive and time demanding usability lab tests or complex webcam solutions.

So when you've integrated Lookback into your app you can send it out to your beta testers and get sessions uploaded as soon as they're done. Lookback-integrated apps can not be submitted to the App Store so there's no risk of privacy abuse in this way. 

What are your immediate goals?

We are currently rounding up the private beta and will be launching publicly soon.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building the tech or your team?

Meeting our own expectations :) We want Lookback to simplify the life of designers, product managers and user experience professionals in particular, so that puts pressure on our own product to live up to that standard.

We've put a great effort into making our site built entirely in JavaScript (using MeteorJS) and much of the logic lives in the browser and this makes it super-snappy and pleasant to work with. It's a similar technique to that used at Asana and others.

And, of course, the technology around recording the user experience itself — there was no simple solution out there to do 60fps screen recording, touch, microphone AND camera recording at the same time and at the quality we want it in. So that took quite some time and effort.

How will the company make money?

Subscription-based packages for user experience recordings.

Who is in your team?

We've got a small but great team with experience of running international, large-scale sites and apps. Our team is also strong in design and user experiences in general which makes this a particularly interesting venture :) You read more about it on my blog here.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years' time?

We're aiming big with this as we believe that this level of understanding should be a standard component of anyone designing anything for real usage.

Exactly where we will be depends on too many things to answer, but given the great reception and demand so far we're already looking into making an Android SDK on top of our iOS one, and expanding our team as we go.

Other than your own, what are your favorite websites/apps/tools?

MeteorJS, Asana, Basecamp, MongoHQ, Dribbble, Ballpark, Spotify, Photoshop.. the list goes on :)