New, 5-Year Anniversary Show – See how it all started…
Stephen Wynkoop and producer Josh Harrison on the show today – with a look back at 5 years of SSWUG TV. Bloopers, how it was done, some funny moments and even a fact-check. This one is one not to miss!
[Watch the Show]
Last Show: SSWUG TV – Interview with Fernando Leitzelar, Senior SharePoint Architect with mindSHIFT Technologies. We also have the latest news coming from the SharePoint Conference 2011 and Oracle OpenWorld 2011. [Watch the Show]
Thoughts So Far From PASS
by Stephen Wynkoop
I think the big thing thus far that I’ve hard from PASS in terms of things that make you think is the concept of crowd-sourced DATA. Sure, it’s not really the terms they were using, but the whole data mart idea, then discovery, enhancement and publishing of data sources publicly… it really does add up to crowd-sourced data.
A crowd-sourced model, where you have access not only to raw data, but also to data that’s been through some interpretation and enhnancement that can have real influence on your business, has possibilities. I think possibilities for good, and possibilities for data that needs a vetting model. We’re sort of back to "who do you trust, and how do you know what’s happened to the data" – but if we can solve that, the possibilities of efficient learning from data are simply incredible.
I just hope we can solve the chain of trust issues with crowd-sourced data. That will be fun to work through.
Be sure to check out today’s show (link above) – with 5 years of the show under our belt now, you can see the first set we used and how it all worked. Kinda fun.
Usability Test Subject Selection
by Ben Taylor
Based on further study and responses from others the test Subject Selection criteria begins to crystallize. It would seem that the criteria for selecting test subjects is different than identifying a target market.
For example, a word processor may be used to produce many different kinds of documents. In that case, test user selection may be based on what kind of task different users may use a word processor to produce. Perhaps you might consider a legal secretary generating legal documents; a student writing a term paper or a thesis; a secretary writing business correspondence; a writer creating a book; a programmer using some form of office automation or mail merge capability.
Each of these people approach the test with a specific goal they wish to accomplish. They can evaluate your product based on the problem they are using your product to solve.
Here are some comments from our readers…
Tedd:
For several months I’ve been involved in another area of usability known as accessibility. Personally I believe these items go hand in hand, today we can’t have one (i.e. address one) without the other. This is especially true when it comes to providing services across the web or doing any software testing. The group to be selected to do the testing should include a wide range of people with different levels of abilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, neurological and combinations of these. Hope you can incorporate this idea in future discussions regarding usability testing.
David:
The biggest problem I see with much usability testing is an underlying assumption that affects both test and tester selection; the idea that improved usability means that the software should be targeted at the lowest common denominator. This implies that the software isn’t really usable until anyone, anywhere, can use it without reading a manual or otherwise receiving training. Perhaps that is what you really need in your particular case, but I’d argue many times it is not.
What usability studies should be targeting is the largest swath of the target audience of the product. Is your target audience anyone with a wallet? Then you need to set the bar low on mental acumen – Jersey Shore cast members are millionaires, you know. But what if your target audience are theoretical physicists at CERN? They can handle more complexity if it also gives them more flexibility (as their needs can vary drastically the moment a new experiment is thought up). If it creates a much simpler interface for these physicists to define their lab experiment in terms of equations written in LaTeX-style, which Jersey Shore members surely don’t know, then why irritate them with a point-and-click equation editor that will slow them down and won’t be nearly as expressive as the American Mathematical Society’s ams-math package clearly is?
Do you thoughts you’d like to add to the discussion. Drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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