There are a couple new and different themes for the Google home page. The Earth Light theme is very nice if you want to see if your friends around the world are in daylight or not, and the Simplicity is Complex is a cool and very different look from the other themes.
By the way, despite two recent posts about Google products, I’ve not taken it upon myself to promote Google products. Google and I just happen to spend quite a bit of time together.
Earth Light:
Simplicity is Complex:
Good news for people in Vancouver guessing whether they should walk or take the bus (especially when it’s raining). You can now text the number of the bus stop to 33333 and you’ll get a text back telling you what time the next six buses are coming.
I tried it out, and it seems to work pretty well, except that it looks like it doesn’t tell you buses coming within the minute, as my text told me I had six minutes to wait and a bus came in about 30 seconds. So better not to run from the bus stop right away to get your coffee after you get your text.
Another nifty feature from Google: you can now get your flight status directly from the Google search box. Typing in Westjet 76 or whatever flight you are on will tell you the exact departure and arrival time of your flight, and whether it’s on time or delayed.
Very handy for the winter season.
I’m excited to announce that I am co-teaching the Interface Design course at Langara College this semester. Part of the Electronic Media Design (EMDP) program, it’s a fast-track one-year program in all things electronical - music, video, websites, etc. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time - having coffee at Prado, ran into my friend Haig, who is now teaching for ECIAD and needs to lighten his workload. We are tag-teaming the first semester and then I will take it over in May. Which is great, as it would be a lot to take on a new course, learn the curriculum and stay at least 3 steps ahead of the students. And I get the pleasure of learning from Haig Armen, who taught me web design at SFU so many years ago.
It wasn’t too long ago that I was fumbling around in the world of HTML and CSS, and I’m so happy to share my knowledge with a bunch of eager minds. It feels really good to give something back.
I’ve come across a couple of alternatives to usability testing in a lab recently. The first is (extremely) rapid testing at a trade show booth, as described in the paper, Extremely Rapid Usability Testing.
Another is usability testing with a number of different audiences at museum conferences explained in, “ Usability@90mph: Presenting and evaluation a new, high-speed method for demonstrating user testing in front of an audience ”.
The second method, which is done in 30 minutes, is basically this:
1. Introduce the audience to the concepts of usability testing (which is observing users trying to conduct typical tasks on a website to identify usability problems) and site evaluation.
2. Find a volunteer in the audience who is not already familiar with the site to test the site. Take the volunteer out of the room for a short period while showing the site in more depth to the audience.
3. A representative of the site provides a more in-depth (but quick) overview of the site to the audience.
4. Usability professionals, who will observe the tester, identify 4-5 tasks to be tested on the site with suggestions from the audience. These tasks should be confirmed as representative and typical by the representative of the site.
5. While the tasks are being identified with the audience, a facilitator explains to the volunteer outside the room how to participate in a usability test (i.e., explains to the volunteer that the exercise is a test of the site, not of the volunteer, and reminds him or her to explain out loud the rationale for how he or she is trying to complete the tasks).
6. The volunteer returns to the room to test the site by trying to complete the tasks identified. The usability professionals observe the volunteer with the audience and take notes about completion rates, problems encountered, and possible recommendations.
7. The facilitators/evaluators discuss and present the usability issues they identified, sometimes with explanations or clarifications from the volunteer on why certain actions or choices were taken.
8. The audience is encouraged to note any usability issues they observed.
9. Solicit as many design recommendations to address the usability issues as possible from the facilitators/evaluators, volunteer, audience, and the person familiar with the site.
I see a lot of benefits to this method:
The main potential drawback I see is that by testing in front of a large audience (in some cases as many as 200 people), the volunteer participant may behave differently than he or she normally would (using a website while being observed by as many as 200 people isn’t exactly replicating the user’s natural environment) by being more persistent in completing tasks or just uncomfortable. The method also basically excludes testers not comfortable in front of an audience.
However, overall it seems like it could be a great complement to a round of usability testing in a lab or contextual inquiry, and I would be quite intrigued to try it out.
