[OT] need usability feedback? I'd love to help

Rails
1

Hi everyone,

If you need a fresh set of eyes to go through your site and see if
anything’s
confusing or frustrating, I’d love to lend a hand. Just drop me an
email :slight_smile:

What do I get out of it? I just love the “exercise”. Also, I’d just like
to
communicate with other developers.

So if you’d like feedback, just let me know!
Daniel

2

On 9/12/06, Daniel H. [email protected] wrote:

Hi everyone,

If you need a fresh set of eyes to go through your site and see if anything’s
confusing or frustrating, I’d love to lend a hand. Just drop me an email :slight_smile:

I am curious, do you have expertise in usability testing (as a user
role) or
usability/rails/web dev experience in general?

I don’t have anything hosted, and won’t likely in the future, but
co-ordinating
usability tests ‘hallway style’ is intruiging (especially if you can
use video-conferencing
and VoIP/IM so that you can get the proper user context necessary for
meaningful
tests).

3

I’ve conducted a number of usability tests and think I’m decent at
spotting
potential problems and communicating them.

I made my first professional web site about 6 years ago and I’ve been
using
Rails since last November. I was the lead programmer for
http://masterformat.com, as well as other projects which I can’t list
here.
In my spare time I created happycarpools.com using rails, which was
pretty
fun :slight_smile:

Usability became really important to me after I started doing online
marketing
and had people asking me to do SEO but not to improve their site. I
realized
that you’re really wasting your money if you’re paying to increase
traffic
that ends up leaving because your site is too confusing or frustrating
to
deal with. So I’ve spent a lot more time working with usability so that
I can
explain its importance to clients and help my clients create actually
successful sites.

Usability’s even more important now, I think, with the use of AJAX and
DOM
scripting to make pages behave in unexpected, unconventional ways.

If you’d like to read some of my thoughts on user experience/usability,
I’ve
started writing a series of articles: which hopefully are helpful:
http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/2006/9/4/how-to-think-about-user-experience-mental-models
(The site, btw, uses Mephisto, Rick O.'s awesome blog system)

I definitely like the idea of using video-conferencing and VoIP :slight_smile:

If you want to have something hosted let me know as well - I’ve just
ordered a
VPS from slicehost that has more space than I’ll likely need for awhile,
and
after I get it set up I’d like to hosting some small (50-100mb, usually
that’s plenty) accounts for free. Also, if you check out the Rails wiki
there
are some free Rails hosts listed.

Thanks!
Daniel