Our first two customers are South Street Steaks and Aqui Brazilian Coffee respectively. As you can see, the sites will eventually need new designs; however, both establishments helped us develop a solid system, have been great beta-testers, and most importantly, they love SandwichBoard.
Today I walked Carminha Simmons of Aqui through SandwichBoard. She added a news article, event, and web page herself during the training. While she used the system, I took notes on anything she didn’t understand, things she got stuck on, and features that broke. When I got back to my home office in the afternoon, I went through my list and fixed the majority of the issues or UI flaws I saw before dinner.
I had direct contact with the customer and saw her every mouse click and facial expression. I was able to discuss with her how to fix things she didn’t understand. I didn’t have to go through a committee or get permission to fix what we thought was broken. All we have to do now is run a command to update our system live in a matter of minutes. Try doing that when working in an organization divided into job functions and heavy processes.
Ian Lotinsky 
nice! sounds like a great agile development model combined with a lot of the techniques we learned in HCI at UMD.
Nick —
Yeah, pretty much. Except it’s more bits-and-pieces of those and it’s all ingrained in the way we think and work now instead of forcing process on what we do.