Librarians expend considerable resources to develop services and implement new products catering their users' changing needs. Such efforts begs for the involvement of library users in the development and/or beta process. The authors, both academic librarians, realized that much of their online services were underused, so they devised a plan to improve the situation. Rather than working hard to set up services that might just sit there as "virtual paperweights," they created a web-based laboratory environment where they put partially functional software for patrons and faculty to play with and comment on. Now those comments can affect software design in preproduction before it's too late, so services are more user-friendly and more used.