Eight strangers were paid to sit in a room and have opinions. The room had beige walls, a one-way mirror that everyone pretended not to notice, and a bowl of mints that nobody touched because touching the mints felt like a commitment. The moderator, a woman named Linda, smiled the way flight attendants smile during turbulence.
"We are here today to discuss a new productivity application," Linda said, reading from a clipboard with the enthusiasm of someone reciting a parking ticket. "Please share your honest reactions." She paused. "There are no wrong answers." This was, of course, a lie. There were many wrong answers. The people behind the mirror had strong feelings about which ones they were.
The app was called FocusNow. Or possibly FocusFlow. The name had changed three times during development and nobody on the team could agree on which version they had shipped. It promised to help users "reclaim their attention through mindful digital engagement." Nobody in the room knew what that meant. They nodded anyway.
The first participant, a man in his fifties wearing a polo shirt, spoke up. "I would use this every day," he said with conviction. He had been holding the phone upside down for the past two minutes. Nobody corrected him because the session was being recorded and corrections cost time.
The second participant, a graduate student, launched into a nine-minute monologue about the neurochemistry of dopamine loops and the commodification of human cognition. She used the word "paradigm" four times. Behind the mirror, the product manager wrote "core user??" on a sticky note and underlined it twice.
Participant three had fallen asleep. Not in a dramatic way. He had simply closed his eyes during a demonstration of the app and drifted off with his chin resting on his hand, looking almost dignified. Linda chose not to wake him. His silence was, technically, a form of feedback.
The real trouble started when participant six, a retired teacher, asked a question that no one had anticipated. "What problem does this solve?" she said. Not aggressively. Genuinely. The room went quiet. Behind the mirror, someone dropped a pen.
"It helps you focus," Linda said. "Yes, but on what?" the teacher replied. "On whatever you need to focus on." "And if I do not need help focusing?" Linda consulted her clipboard. The clipboard did not have an answer for this. It had never come up in testing because the testers had all been employees.
The session ended fifteen minutes early. The participants collected their gift cards and left through a side door that led to a hallway that smelled like carpet cleaner. Behind the mirror, the team sat in silence. The product manager stared at the sticky note. The sleeping man had left a mint wrapper on his chair. He had taken a mint after all.
Three months later the app launched. It was downloaded four hundred thousand times in the first week. The reviews were mixed. One user called it "life-changing." Another called it "a timer with a subscription fee." Both were accurate. The retired teacher never downloaded it. She was busy reading a book.