Our new website has gone live for Webnographer, the remote usability testing tool that we have developed. We spent some time working on the Information Architecture of the site with Danny Hope, of UX Brighton fame.

The challenge we faced, which is common for many sites, is that our audience has many levels of knowledge both about Usability, and Remote Usability.  Information Architecture is critical for any website, that is getting the conceptual structure and logical organization of the site right.

So, how did we go about it?

We put the user at the heart of our design. This is usually done in the world of usability and information architecture through reasearch and creating personas. These personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site.

There are many heated discussions to be found on the subject on the IxDA mailing list, with many different arguments for and against personas.

Here is our take on it. We don’t use them. Instead, we use real people! The important thing is that you think about your user, a person. Not a target market, that is a non-tangible thing. Thinking about a real person helps build empaphy, helps focus your design process, and lets you design better products. Personas help encourage this. But they take time to create as they are fictional creations of a user type. Real people work just as well, and even better, because you don’t have to imagine whether they would like something, as you can just give them a call and ask them.

The process of using real people

When we started designing the website, the first step was to map out the target audience that we had identified to date. As you can see on the picture of the white board, we broke our user base down by the industry sector they worked in (see picture of white board). For example in our case: In-house UX specialists,  Agencies, and Usability Professionals, Developers, etc.  Then we picked people who were representative for the culture of a sector, put their names on the board. (To protect their identity I have smudged out their names.) We know these representative users, as we have met them and keep meeting them throughout the concurrent ethnographic research that we are carying out.

The hard part in the exercise was to identify what are peoples motivations and feelings.  This is always hard as people have varied backgrounds, knowledge and views. Even people in the same sector have different mental models. Using real people to motivate the design, meant that if we where unsure about their motivation, all it took was a phone call, or meet up with them to find out.

Once we had our hypothesis of peoples motivations, we then could start creating the structure of the site and different message for communication. As you can see on the photo on the left the design started taking place, and the design for our website evolved.

So, are we finished?

No. We work agile and want to keep improving our site. People and technology will keep changing, and so too will the Webnographer website. Also, we are aware that some of the language used on the site is still geeky, and needs to be “translated” into non-geek language. This is something we are working on at the moment. Also we are very keen on getting feedback from our users, so if there is anything you like, dislike, or fell is missing, please feel free to leave you comments here. We are listening!

We would like to thank Danny for all the enlightenment in structuring the ideas and the insight that he gave us. Just look at our old holding page above and compare that to our new website. Its a great improvement!

We are helping to organise a Groovy and Grails meet up in Brighton on the 24 March at 7pm.

Grails is one of the fastest growing web frameworks, and as Brighton has many meet ups for other frameworks and programming languages including Rails and Python, so we thought that it was time that there would be one for Grails and Groovy.  Another important reason is the creator of Grails, Graeme Rocher, has just moved down to Brighton.

Grails and Groovy

The reason that Wired magazine, Pepsi Cola, Sky TV use Grails, and why we at FeraLabs chose to develop Webnographer in Grails, is that it allows one to build an application quickly.

Grails uses the Groovy programming language, which is another creation from the United Kingdom. Groovy runs on the Java platform (which means it will run on most computers), and has a unique syntax that means it easy for both somebody from a Java background to start programming in it, and somebody more used to other dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

The Book

Graeme has just written a book on Grails. He will bring a couple along to sell to the event, but you can order the book The Definitive Guide to Grails 2nd Edition (Expert’s Voice in Web Development) on Amazon as well.

The meet up in Brighton

At the meet up, Graeme will demonstrate the speed of developing in the framework by building a Twitter clone in less than 40 minutes. In my personal opinion not only is Grails fast to develop a web application in, it also has a very low learning curve for both the experienced programmer and the novice.

When and Where?

Danny Hope of #UXBRI (the meetup for User Experiance in Brighton) has kindly arranged for us to use the historic Regency TownHouse.

24 March @ 7pm
Regency Town House
13 Brunswick Square
Hove, East Sussex
BN3 1EH

Sign up for the event on Upcoming to secure your place.

This is an update of where we are with Webnographer.

We are developing Webnographer using Agile Project Management Techniques. Agile builds the project in very small iterations of between 1 and 4 weeks. At the end of each iteration the software should be working. To give an example with Webnographer in our first iteration the whole system was usable from start to end. I.e. we could build a test, get participants to test a website, and analyse the results.

Not only did we want to just build a tool that could give summative results, for example how long a user takes on a task. But we wanted to build a remote testing tool that could be used for formative testing as well. Webnographer enables this by capturing users interactions on the page, as well as qualitative and quantitative questionnaire data. This means that Webnographer does not just report the state of a system (as in summative evaluations), but also provides insight into where, how and why user errors occur (as in formative evaluations).

So how could we build complex usability testing software in a week? We didn’t. When we started, the building of the test and the analysis of the results had to be done by hand. Over a number of iterations what had to be done by hand got automated.

The Agile technique is a revolt against the traditional waterfall approach. Under the old fashioned waterfall approach the business specifies exactly the software that will be built, the developers build it, and then it gets tested, and hopefully released. The challenge with the waterfall approach is that it often led to software projects running over time and budget.

With Agile each iteration can either add features or rework what has been built before. This has the advantage for developing Webnographer, that as we get feedback from each of the tests that we run with clients, the results feed back into each iteration and add to an improvement of the tool.

Up until now, we have mainly focused on the design of the test set up. The test set up was the most time consuming part and easiest to automate for Webnographer. Before it had its simple interface, to create a test each one had to be hand crafted, taking half a day. Modification of a test was hard, time consuming, and error prone. So we have focused on developing an easy to use interface for the test design. This is now complete.

The next iterations will focus on the analysis part of the product. The driving force is that we want to show people actionable results in an easy to understand way. Sample reports are to follow soon.