Geek4Eva

Yesterday we got an excellent overview from one of our colleagues on Usability.

Image Source

He is an Usability Expert – i.e. he doesn’t just organises and manages Usability Testing, but also does a whole lot of other stuff that is required to get it correct.

Just to mention it briefly:

• it requires quite a bit of research to start with; based on your application, userbase, etc
• Organisational Objectives
• Business Objectives
• User Objectives
• identifying personas, as in what different types of users are expected to use the system
• preparing wireframes
• templates
• and then a whole raft of things to organise some user testing, like, identifying test subjects, organising questionairre for them, petrol vouchers, food, compensation, post-testing questionairre and most importantly a test lab.

…Phew!!!

Overall it was a great session. Quite insightful and gave us some food for thought. Hopefully he will also be trying to setup a framework, so that we can work within it.

In the meantime enjoy this post On Usability by Ben and if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions then feel free to feed them through to us using the comments box below.

This happened almost 2 years ago when I had called one of the local council services to reserve a community center. On being asked for my email I gave her my Gmail address and the response from her was something like – ‘oh never heard of that one before!‘. Fair enough – I don’t blame her for that. Gmail wasn’t and still isn’t that popular with non-techy people.

In the meantime Google has been advertising its cloud service a bit lately and has also dropped its ‘beta’ tag from Gmail which was causing some hesitation for companies to use Gmail as their corporate email solution.

As per the latest report released by InformationWeek, Google’s Gmail has just overtaken AOL’s email service. I think earlier Gmail used to be only a kind of geek’s-choice, but lately it is getting quite popular with rest of the people as well.

Personally I use Gmail but I think it has a bit of a geeky user interface and not really easy-to-use for someone not that tech savvy – unlike Yahoo and Hotmail. Though it’s changing lately and may be thats one of the many reasons why Gmail is getting more user base. Whereas Hotmail used to be most easy to use interface for a long time – but now with increased features (most of them are useless flashy features) it has compromised on the usabiltiy side.

Anyways I’d just like to end with ‘may the best one win’. And hope that consumer is the winner at the end’.

If you’re not on Gmail – then click here to get it.

Source