Do you do usability testing?

Hello My Unknown Audience!

I have a come to a point in my day job where I would like to know how the users are actually using our application. For this I need someone or some people to do some usability testing, not lots, but some. Anything in fact, would be better then where we are now.  Let me give you a bit of background.

We design and build a product in New Zealand, and it is marketed and sold to clients in the USA. We, the developers don’t garner a lot of feedback from our management about how the users actually use the software, just the list of what’s wrong with it and what needs to be added e.g. bugs and feature requests,  the usual whip cracking.

Very few of the feature requests come from actual end users. The features and product direction are driven by management, not users. Which in itself is not all bad, they know the market and have a good understanding of what the product needs to be able to do to keep up with our competitors. However, as a developer who wants to improve the users experience of the application I would love to start doing some usability testing. Nothing exciting like setting up a special room with darkened glass windows where the developers watch eagle eyed the subjects use the application. Some basic Q & A with customers and someone observing how people use the application once a month would do!

Doing it wrong

So my question to you is, if you do usability testing at your company, how do you do it and how has it changed your product, has it proved beneficial to your product?

If you have no idea what usability testing is, have a watch of this video: Usability Testing, the least you can do.

Answers on a post card 🙂

Setting a Select box to a specified value

Quick post on how to set a select box to a string string value, after a page has loaded.

In the app I work with we have a list of search engines thus:

<select name="_select_criteria" id="_select_criteria">
 <option value="" selected></option>
 <option value="Altavista">Altavista</option>
 <option value="AOL">AOL</option>
 <option value="Ask Jeeves">Ask Jeeves</option>
 <option value="Comcast">Comcast</option>
 <option value="Earthink">Earthink</option>
 <option value="Google">Google</option>
 <option value="Google Images">Google Images</option>
 <option value="MSN">MSN</option>
 <option value="Netscape">Netscape</option>
 <option value="Windows Live Search">Windows Live Search</option>
 <option value="Yahoo">Yahoo</option>
</select>

Now when the page loads the first time, we have no way of determining what should be selected as the default, after something has been selected, that’s relativly easy to handle server side.

I wrote a quick piece of javascript to come up with a solution to setting the default value of the select box. Thus:

Ext.onReady(function(){
 // set the search box to google as it defaults there.
 // query for the select criteria box.
 var selectbox = Ext.get('_select_criteria');

 Ext.each(selectbox.options, function(item, index){

// iterate and set the select box's selected index to whatever position google is.
 if(item.value == "Google")
 {
     selectbox.selectedIndex = index;
 }
 });
});

That’s why I love Javascript! especially with Ext… Yum!

I’m half way to being MySQL certified

Hey Hey,

If anyone still reads this after the other domain expired (I trust most of you updated your links/subscriptions) I’ll explain the reason behind my prolonged absence.

I’ve been studying for a MySQL exam, the certified developer exam part 1. Ok not big news in itself, but it was big for me, I’ve given it 6 months and a heck of a lot of practice and I’m please to say I passed on Friday 1st May with a score of 61 / 70.Couple that with the fact that it’s probably the first legitimate study I’ve undertaken since being 17 and breezing through high school.

So, now that’s down I’m gonna hold up on the study for a short time as the Mrs and I are planning on getting busy, heh not like that… although…. hahha stop now. We’ve got some projects under way, wheels in motion that kind of thing that we want/need to focus on.

So After passing this exam, I’m think give it a gcouple of week / months and hit the books again for part two, by which time it’ll be defunct as Oracle will have totally owned MySQL.

Changing the subject a little, if you get the chance and are around in Auckland for the next few weeks, take the time to go to the Comedy Festival. You won’t regret it. We went to see the opening night’s “Big Show”, yeah it’s actually called “the big show” it was fantastic, the comedians included Dan Nightingale (Preston, UK – I used to live there, awesome funny chap), Lindsay Webb (Aussie, who heckled me for going to Mexico on honeymoon) and a guy called Carey Marx, who I think stole the show! His timing and delivery was just fantastic, all of these guys plus a couple more who I can’t remember made for a fantastic night out! So go see some comedy.

Time to get back to some javascripting posts now…

James