Thought on usability testing
Recently in discussions about the location and function of parts of a web site design, I came up against some ‘usability’ research based opinion. Which is good. Why? It means people care enough to look at how people use their site. But what made be a little hesitant to take the information as relevant to this particular design was that the study was based on a totally different design and content layout. The information is only literally relevant to that particular site. It doesn’t mean it is not useful information mind you.
All the effort that went into testing that site and the specific information is not entirely useful once you change the content or tweak some navigation or change the design or any change really. The general rules established by watching your users are useful, however, but do people focus too much on the specifics in the testing results?
The question of where to invest time and money when you have neither is really important. A very useful article entitled Testing versus Training might help you decide if you are better off training your group in general usability concepts or spending the time testing or both. I lean towards learning the concepts, checking out the excellent resources all over the net, and if you have time doing some quick and dirty testing to see how users view your site.
If you dig through my design and link collection categories you might find some useful stuff. In the area of usability, this site needs some work 
Planning on doing that soon.
Call for papers – Web Communications and Strategies Conference
The Web Communications and Strategies Conference is looking for presenters. It is a smaller conference that takes place in Salisbury Maryland July 18-20. What a place to be in July. Last year I presented the Four Corners of a University web space and if it wasn’t for a trip to the UK I would definately go again this year. Great conference with an education focus.
Usability, Canadian copyright, bye bye IE 5.5
This will likely be added to over the day. For starters here are some cool links I dug up this week and need to remember:
- You might have noticed some long overdue changes on the results page of UW Google searches. How does it work for you? After reading an oldie but goodie article on Evolution trumps Usability Guidelines I am thinking there is a lot of work ahead.
- One of the things CSS designers face is redundancy vs. dependency.
- Joe Clark explains How to quote somebody else’s work without infringing copyright in Canada – all students would benefit from reading this.
- Setting yearly business goals or how about setting just goals for your job over the year?
- Good bye IE 5 – the first of many. Of course why would you still be using IE 5.x to begin with?
Update Movable Type now
It has been remarked with stunning clarity that you should update your Movable Type. Do it. We don’t want another phpBB incident to occur around here now do we? (I am using Textpattern so I am ok)
Ruby on rails roles along
Last term I heard about this Ruby on Rails platform through some comments on Drew’s blog. So I took a look. At the time the site was pretty rough, just in development I imagine. But the documentation was impressive. I got my co-op student at the time to compare Ruby on Rails with PHP for work term report (I will share it with his permission once the report is finished) which contained nothing but praise for it from his 3rd year CS perspecitive. The word of mouth even has hit Slashdot recently with the appearance Rolling with Ruby on Rails.
I almost wish I heard about this sooner for a PHP app we are working on for my office… Although it is never wise to build a critical app on ‘cutting edge’ technology. But what fun is playin it safe? I will be looking at it over the next few months when time allows… pretty cool indeed.
