I think one issue is that it is not widescreen. If it about consuming media
shouldn't the device be wide screen for movies.
Is it a good user experiance watching a movie on a narrow screen?
Also I can not just plug in devices into the USB.
And there is the issue of DRM. Especially with apple
Christine,
You make an intresting point.
Some academic claim that Usability is not Science but instead an ethic. See
Paul Cairns Harold Thimbleby 2008 http://en.scientificcommons.org/42316368
I am not fully convinced of this but I think it is an intresting argument.
If Usability is an Ethic
so I am looking for GA-but-not-GA.
So you are looking for Piwik http://piwik.org/.
James
2009/12/29 Kordian Piotr Klecha kpkle...@gmail.com
Thanx, Chad. Google Analytics is great - but no data send is
indisputable requirement, so I am looking for GA-but-not-GA.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
In regards to Wikki's the easiest one for people to use is probably
http://moinmo.in/
http://moinmo.in/With MoinMoin there is no special markup to learn. It is
quite easy to set up. It is very easy to setup on a individual machine, and
then later move it to a server.
And it is easy to import the
All you need is a text area that is big enough to take the data.
I would use Ajax to upload the data to the server, or use Javascript on the
client to validate the data which should be faster.
Your business partners pattern is nice if you have the excel sheet open, as
the user only has to copy
Have you tried another mock up tool called pidoco.com which fully supports
story boarding, as well as prototype testing. I have heard it is free for
Educational use, if you email them.
It may be worth asking them for an export function, of not just the
prototypes, but the use cases as well to Cog
it if, you wanted to argue with me, you'd actually argue with
something I actually said. It really would make my side of the argument
easier.
Thanks,
Jared
On Oct 8, 2009, at 12:26 PM, James Page wrote:
Jared,
Give a small team a chance to come up with something new and innovative
the differences and send you a link.
All the best
James
blog.feralabs.com
2009/10/4 Jared Spool jsp...@uie.com
On Oct 4, 2009, at 5:40 AM, James Page wrote:
The issue I have with testing with just a few users is that it can exclude
a significant issue.
James,
I think that's
think I think.
On Oct 8, 2009, at 5:24 AM, James Page wrote:
I think where you are confused is that Deming did not believe in raw
targets.
I never said that Deming didn't believe in raw targets. What I said was,
You're creating a final inspection mentality, which Demming and the world
Jared,
I enjoyed your post, and it is interesting how there was a paradigm shift
from large to small studies. Surely the web's advent in the late 90's mean
that the techniques developed in the late 80's and early 90's need updating,
to leverage the technology change that has happened since then.
It is dependent on how many issues there are, the cultural variance of your
user base, and the margin of error you are happy with. Five users or even 10
is not enough on a modern well designed web site.
The easy way to think of a Usability Test is a treasure hunt. If the
treasure is very obvious
with a group of 5-10
participants. You'll find that 65%+ figure above rises to 99%+ in that case.
Again, doesn't change your basic points about cultural diversity and
behaviour affecting the test parameters, but your above point is not
entirely accurate.
Cheers
Steve
2009/10/2 James Page jamesp
to take.
Regards
Steve
2009/10/2 James Page jamesp...@gmail.com
Steve,
The real issue is that the example I have given is that it is over
simplistic. It is dependent on sterile lab conditions, and the user
population been the same in the lab and in the real world. And there only
being one
), and in some cases - few - you could get away with less
(although I admit that the use of less than 5 participants causes me some
concern).
Anyway, enjoying the discussion, and I still think we're violently in
agreement on the basic point :)
Cheers
Steve
2009/10/2 James Page jamesp
If you go back to 1987 Byte Magazine ran a cover about the Browser been the
future OS.
Netscape and Sun both pushed this view that the OS was dead. Sun was
pushing Java applets.
Microsoft then launched a browser. Years of Anti Trust battle happened.
Back in 1987 there was two challenges. Most
--UPDATE--
Since the event sold out overnight, UXBrighton have changed venues and added
more tickets - there are now more available.
Even if you are not based in Brighton in the UK it will worth while to come
along, as it is free, and Brighton is very easy to get to.
Gatwick Airport is only 30
Agile is in fact very user focused. It is focused on the programmer, the
developer, in other words the user of the Agile process.
The challenge with UCD is that came around in the days of Waterfall
development. Trying to get some of the process to fit into an agile
development is hard, because
not sure if you mentioned on this list, that CrunchBase
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/loop11lists you as the CEO of Loop11, or
are there more than one Toby Biddle working in the same building that
UsabilityOne
and Loop11 share?
All the best
James Page
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/8/17 Toby
It totally depends on who your users are.
One of our clients who have a large general demographic; screen sizes seam
to be all over the place. Including quite small (think of all those netbooks
out there).
On our own site www.webnographer.com http://www.webnographer.com which is
aimed at people
Lets go all we the back to Englisc. That is not a spelling mistake but the
name of the language we in England spoke before English.
The advantage of us using Englisc is that it is far more compatible with
Dutch, German and other languages.
But we would run into the problem if we should use formal
://blog.feralabs.com
2009/5/28 Jared Spool jsp...@uie.com
On May 28, 2009, at 11:10 AM, James Page wrote:
I think the issue I have with Personas is that they are, as the paper
points
out, Fictional.
The paper was bounded by experimental constraints, like all research is.
Supplying
Frank,
An interesting study.
I think the issue with using heuristic evaluations is the well known issue
with the evaluator effect.
For example see:
http://akira.ruc.dk/~mhz/Research/Publ/IJHCI2001_preprint.pdfhttp://akira.ruc.dk/%7Emhz/Research/Publ/IJHCI2001_preprint.pdf
On to the issue of
Jared,
I did not mean that all your ancestors had children is a negative. Just that
this is an example that does not have the inductive issue.
It must be start of summer :-)
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/5/29 James Page jamesp...@gmail.com
@Jared,
Don't get me wrong this is great
://blog.feralabs.com
2009/5/29 Joshua Porter por...@bokardo.com
On May 29, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Jared Spool wrote:
On May 29, 2009, at 6:36 AM, James Page wrote:
I think the issue with using heuristic evaluations is the well known
issue
with the evaluator effect.
Wow, James. You are *so* missing
I think the issue I have with Personas is that they are, as the paper points
out, Fictional.
The paper compares three groups; one group that is briefed with photos of
personas, one which uses illustrations of the personas and the last group is
briefed to with no personas, and uses aesthetic
Just randomise the order of each scenarios.
It also can be quite interesting to ask people there expectation of how
hard they think the task will be before each task, and then ask them how
hard it was. See: the book Measuring the user experience.. Also see
Harry Brignull has some interesting posts here :-
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/04/16/five-ux-antipatterns-to-avoid-when-designing-log-in-registration-areas/
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/03/16/signup-forms-must-die-heres-how-we-killed-ours/
All the best
James
@Elizabeth Bacon
Thanks for putting the list up .
We will launching an update of our website in the next week or two, so until
then here is the missing data from your list for Webnographer.
All the best
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
Pricing
Currently our pricing is based on the time it needs
Hi Jay,
There is many different types of remote usability testing. They full into
two different basic types Asynchronous and Synchronous. Net Meeting falls
into the Synchronous category.
My partner Sabrina Mach explains here in this blog post
@Jared,
I had the entire day planned for dredging and misapplication. What should I
do with it, now?
I sure that we can come up with other old arguments we can argue about. :)
All the best
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/4/13 Jared Spool jsp...@uie.com
On Apr 13, 2009, at 12:29 AM, Alan
AJ,
Thanks for the feedback, we are redesigning the website as I write this.
Most our focus has been on the product until now, and the only page that is
there at the moment is a holding page.
But so I can put a quick fix up could you clarify what you did, as all the
links should point back to
Jared,
As one of the people developing one of the other tools on the market,
webnographer http://webnographer.com , I will point out some corrections
to the points that you raise.
The first point is that there is a remote data collection tool, and a remote
method. Collecting the data is only the
@Kathy
I would love to disagree with you that Remote can not totally replace other
methods. But as one of the methods we use to test our own unmoderated remote
testing method is the lab, I would be hypocrite if I did. Each method has it
advantages and disadvantages.
Many people are pointing out
Anybody know a better way of them to the user with controlled content and
format?
FlashPaper 2 document, the user will need Flash. Flash seams to have higher
penetration than Acrobat.
Have a look at http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/
And also http://issuu.com/
I have no idea which
next to a PDF link on a web page. Is this necessary?
Yes. I am just looking at some web stats for a clients site, out of 12,000
visits today, only 2500 had a pdf viewer. This site is mainly focused on
consumers so these stats may not apply to your site.
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/3/16
So what to do?
A little bit of javascript magic. Use javascript to test if the user has a
pdf reader, if not show them the link to download it.
The issue seams to be people don't know what Acrobat is and then combine
the web stats I gave before, with Caroline findings, and it looks scary.
There
trying to figure it out before deciding on the
javascript
approach. Either way, your usability assesment should ensure that the
design
still works even if your user is a false negative for the plugin.
Cheers!
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, James Page jamesp...@gmail.com
wrote
caroline.jarr...@effortmark.co.uk
James Page said:
It depends on the design.
You can have badly done qualitative studies,
as well as poorly designed quantitative studies.
I replied:
True, but it's so much *easier* to mess up on a survey.
James replied:
Depends on if you create your own
Out of interest how many participants are you testing with? Could
you break the numbers down?
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/3/12 Dana Chisnell d...@usabilityworks.net
Thanks for the prompt, Jared. There's no reason to limit the age range *at
all.* As long as the behaviors are the same
think of is if you're creating different sites. You're not.
Dana
On Mar 12, 2009, at 9:21 AM, James Page wrote:
Out of interest how many participants are you testing with? Could
you break the numbers down?
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/3/12 Dana Chisnell d...@usabilityworks.net
* to have it.
Dana
On Mar 12, 2009, at 10:21 AM, James Page wrote:
@dana
I am bit confused here by your question What difference does it make how
many you're testing?
Surely factors such as margin of error, and statistical power
are important, or are they not?
The point of testing
, at 10:21 AM, James Page wrote:
Mac users are different, why - I don't know.
We've found the same over the years and contributed it to the different
environment of the MacOS to Windows OS.
And we get allot of behavioural differences by culture - (place of birth
vs residence).
Absolutely
the designer on the team uses photoshop, she still sketches, and paints.
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/3/12 Todd Zaki Warfel li...@toddwarfel.com
On Mar 12, 2009, at 11:36 AM, James Page wrote:
@todd
How do you work around that w/Webnographer?
I didn't find a place on the website
@caroline
It depends on the design.
You can have badly done qualitative studies,
as well as poorly designed quantitative studies.
True, but it's so much *easier* to mess up on a survey.
Depends on if you create your own questions or use ones that have been
tested before. There is allot
@Peter,
The problem that everybody is trying to solve is as Karl Marx defined it is
alienation. There is a distance between the end user and the designer of a
product. To get a suit made, fifty years ago I would go to a tailor, who
would have direct contact with me, and be able to understand my
have been doing it since Malinowski.
When a new theme develops it means that we do not have to alter a persona.
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/3/10 Todd Zaki Warfel li...@toddwarfel.com
On Mar 10, 2009, at 7:31 AM, James Page wrote:
@todd
The issue here is that personas
I would look at Sussex as well as City, UCL, Middlesex, and the
interaction course at the Royal College of Art.
It may be worth asking the question is do they practice what they teach? How
good is their web sites?
I have done a quick scan and most of them fail such basic questions such as
:-
Do
What we use is real people, not personas.
We jot notes on each person. Collect and cross reference their needs, and
wants.
If there is a question that needs answering all we have to do is ask the
person, on the other hand Personas can't talk. We can come up with
a hypothesis and test against real
So for personas... that means doing personas without the research... and in
my book that is often worse than having no personas at all.
We just cut the personas, and the time saved spend it on user research.
User research can be done quite cheaply especially if you
can integrate yourself
research with the client and maybe write it up.
James Page
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/2/28 Pietro Desiato pietro.desi...@gmail.com
I really enjoyed your video: very good job. There are also some
interesting points about contexts: the book by Barbara is definitely
worth reading. Mobile
When the user is wasting time! We found in a study of over 1,000 users that
they used the internet on their phone when they had nothing else to do,
which breaks the misconception that the user is using the phone to save
time. This research was done in the UK, where many people do long train
Rafael
In my experience it really depends on the product, the price, and
the audience. One thing that I do know is cutting the number of clicks in
every case I have experienced increases the conversation rate. Why do you
have Personal Details and Address Details pages?
Use a method like GOMS to
2009/2/5 Elizabeth Buie eb...@luminanze.com
At 3:31 AM + 2/5/09, James Page wrote:
If you want to be clever
place the top 5 countries at the top of the list as well, but make
sure that the country is listed alphabetically as well.
[snip]
When the country is promoted to the
top
The answer is it depends on what you are ordering, it also may depend on
where your participant is from, the length of the list.
On the question of ordering by country in our testing that we have done in a
remote study of over 100 participants, the findings where always list the
countries
Ali,
As Scott said
Think about what approaches fit the culture, attitude and environment you're
in.
You should be good at this, it's a kind of problem solving, which is what
designers do.
I have written on my blog
http://blog.feralabs.com/2008/12/why-i-started-webnographer/ the attitudes
of
also tried to use it as way of automating GOMS KLM metrics (doing
this by hand is tedious), but this needs allot more work.
James Page
http://blog.feralabs.com
2009/1/28 Nik Lazell nik.laz...@realadventure.co.uk
Hi Harry,
Thanks for your reply.
I was really just trying to establish
In a remote study we conducted a month ago using participants in France,
Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy. We found that virtually all the
participants entered their phone numbers the way that they are used to,
ignoring all instructions on the form. Participants in the countries tested
just did
Hi Sam,
We have just carried out some remote usability testing on this issue.
Postcode lookup only seams to work in the UK, and the Netherlands for
starters.
You need to ask for House Number or Name to reduce the number on the list of
returned houses.
Most people are used to enter their address
Float the item you guessed to the top. Under than
put USA, under that an alphabetical listing of all the rest of the
countries.
Why this isn't common in forms is beyond me.
If you look at my response at the top of this discussion the reason is that
in test we have carried out :-
So for
Which is why they typically only use maps for the initial selection of a
continent or region
This does not work. When we carried out a Remote study of Academics in every
continenent of the world. We got the following results when the continent /
region was selected first.
See my response
the challenges that they point out.
All the best
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2008/12/30 Todd Zaki Warfel li...@toddwarfel.com
On Dec 30, 2008, at 7:36 AM, James Page wrote:
You run into the challenge with that the Persona are validated by opinion.
Actually, if you look at the model I
Jeff,
We have just done a Remote Usability study where one of the issues was
people selecting their country. The system been tested placed the country
where it thought the user was from at the top of the drop down list of 195
countries. This is a common pattern with sites in America often listing
Jared,
So just after you have got everybody reading about Activity Theory, now you
are getting them to read up about Functionalism :-) So we now have as basis
of design. UCD, SCD, ACD, and now FCD.
Functionalism is an interesting an idea to use for design. see:
perfect airports in the middle of nowhere,
and getting nothing in return.
All the best
James
http://blog.feralabs.com
2008/12/30 Todd Zaki Warfel li...@toddwarfel.com
On Dec 30, 2008, at 4:35 AM, James Page wrote:
My argument before that Persona is not a valid method as there is no way
I think the challenge of maps is trying to select a small country in size.
Try selecting Monte Carlo, the Vatican, St Kits and Nevis, and even slightly
larger ones like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Montenegro, Bosnia, Benin,
Togo.
James
2008/12/30 Allison alliwalk1...@yahoo.com
Well, I don't
Sam,
We have just done a study for a bank on this issue.
The issue of security questions is hard. We have had the security team of a
bank reject the idea of letting users select their own security questions
because the users could make the question too simple.
But from user testing we have found
Mary,
At Feralabs using our Webnographer Remote usability software we have carried
out a number of Remote Usability tests in Africa. I also used to work for
one of the largest Sub Saharan African owned software companies.
Your idea of using Skype with Africa runs into a number of challenges,
to the actual behaviors of actual people with deep insight and
understanding, but should not ever be generalized beyond that level of
detail?
Which is closer to real small-t truths?
Chris
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 9:49 AM, James Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi All,
I think it may help people here
Hi All,
I think it may help people here if I inject some theory into
this discussion.
The first point is that people keep making claims that the method has some
scientific validity. For example Liz says that Hopefully my quick
elucidation about the original persona creation methodology helps you
Personas are not meant to represent one person or user. They are meant to
represent classes or segments of users. This is a valid use of them.
It is hard for a Peronsa to represent classes or segments of users. Chapman
and Milham put it far better than I could.
Unfortunately, one cannot use
:49 AM, James Page wrote:
The point I am trying to make is that Activity Theory output is the
activity
and actions of individuals.
The Persona acts as a stereotype between real users and the designer.
There may be a problem with Activity Theory been dry. One can see from
this discussion
So I'm wondering why Jared framed ACD as ignoring the goals, needs, and
contexts of the users.
Because from what I have heard is Jared is neither Swedish, nor has
background in Marxist Theory, either of these qualifications is
really important to fully comprehend Activity Theory. :-)
I think
Peter,
I agree in what you are saying.
Where we are now is very dangerous. The practice that we are is not a
pure aesthetic discipline (and there is loads of theory there anyway but it
matters less), but one that is making a claim that by using it it will lead
to more usable software, or a
Josh,
It can be a good model or a bad model.
Most theories would argue that a good model needs testing. How do you test
your Persona's? Testing means that you need to measure the output of your
model, and compare it to the real world. I really do not see how you can do
this with Personas.
Jared,
Great post.
I think one important difference of ACD vs UCD is that ACD has a strong
paradigm behind it. ACD comes out of Activity Theory. This should make ACD
more concrete than a UCD approach, which seams to have little of a core.
In your email you quote the following Who cares what we
ACD ignores goals, needs, and context, whereas UCD does not. It's a
superset / subset relationship.
Just to clear up Activity Theory does not ignore this.
For example you start off by observing users. From this observation you
break down the groups into praxis (people doing the same thing),
coz I don't see how you can think about activities without having some
concept, however minimal, of the end users goals, needs and context.
Activity Theory breaks everything down into activities, actions,
and operations are what then informs the design. Activity Theory very much
takes the
Richard,
How do you combine Persona's and Activity Theory?
I don't see how the two are compatible. AT looks at activities through real
behaviour.
If you add Personas you are adding a multitude of parameters in the middle.
James
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:38 AM, Richard Rutter [EMAIL
In the UK there is a campaign to make legal contracts simpler to understand.
See:-
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/
they have a list of guides available here:-
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/guides.htm
and a software tool for inspecting websites.
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/DrivelDefence.html
X posted from the Agile Usability mailing list.
Stewart Brand was the creator of the Whole Earth catalog which was an
inspiration for Steve Jobs, Wikipedia, and Wired magazine. Steve Jobs said
of the catalog that It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years
before Google came along: it
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