Danny-T.co.uk

I’ve been tasked with planning a real (as in get a load of people together) forum focus group (edit: I think focus group is a better term than forum) for assessing the usability of a website. I’ve always wanted to do such an excercise but to date none of the projects i’ve worked on have either had the budget or appreciation for the value of such a task.

I’ve a few ideas and some textbook definitions of what such a forum should consist of but I thought I could come up with something far better if I abuse leverage the full potential of the MXNA audience.

My current plan is as follows:

Sessions
We need to do four sessions, i’m thinking about 5 attendees per session and about an hour per session. Any longer and I think we’ll struggle to get people to attend (even with a token financial incentive).
Will hire a private room with no distractions.

Setup
Am going to setup ‘caves’ (XP speak for private single PC desks) with remote monitoring software so I (or the facilitator) can watch but not interfere with user operation. This is so we can replicate how they would likely use the site if they were using the site for real.

Monitoring
Each attendee will be given 5 minutes to familiarise themselves with the site with no other instruction than play around and see what you find. Then 10 minutes to complete a set of tasks.
I intend to have a list of objectives I can assess each user on by giving a score out of 4 on their competence in using the site (using 4 not 5 so there’s not fence sitting, it’s either Very Bad, Bad, Good or Very Good) also note any other relevant observations.
I’ll also probably record the screens and maybe the user themselves for the option of further review later.

Discussion
Once all 5 have used the site we will move to a ‘commons’ area where the group can have an open discussion about their experience in using the site. I’ll have some leading questions for if the conversation needs any steering or kick-starting but I’d like to keep it as much led by the attendees as possible, whilst I can make claims of being the usability guru, they are the users and will have a far more valuable collective opinion than my own blinkered, tech-led view.

Your Help
I’m interested in any comments you might have on the rough approach outlined about, any suggestions you can make to add to, remove or improve.
Ideas on what to look out for when monitoring users.
The biggest unknown to me is where to get the attendees from, we have some ideas but it’s not something we’ve been tasked with before, if anyone knows of any London-based companies who can arrange this type of thing then i’d be interested to know.
Also any ideas on how to summarise findings and make recommendation, I’m goign to try to record and note as much as possible from the sessions so any decent ideas on how to best summarise and present findings would be much appreciated.
And finally if anyone has any useful references for this type of activity that would also be very useful.

If anyone can offer comment I’d be extremely grateful and I’m intending to blog the progress and findings as we go.

RIA giants Cynergy Systems have announced they are creating a practice dedicated to RIA development using Silverlight.

I think this is a very sound move for Cynergy and one of the few I’ve seen who have managed disassociate themselves from an emotional tie to Adobe technologies and embrace alternatives from such a serious contender as Microsoft. Note this is not them saying “no more Adobe”, this is them saying they are experts in the RIA space and offer choice to their customers to have the most approriate solution using the most appropriate technology.

There will be big budgets being thrown around by big companies who get caught up in the excitement generated by Microsoft and by Mix07 and Cynergy are showing they will be there to ride that wave. Fair play to them, I’m a fan of Cynergy’s work and look forward to seeing what they come up with on the Silverlight front.

This week I am on a training course titled “Creating engaging user experiences with Microsoft Expression” “Delivering Rich Online Experiences Using Miscrosoft Expression, ASP.Net, AJAX and WPF” (edit: surprisingly I couldn’t remeber the exact title without the material in front of me, this is now the real course title and a better indication of the content).

Why?
Well, I met Andrew Shorten, a former Macromedia/Adobe now Microsoft UX guy after my presentation on Apollo at the LFPUG in February. We got to talking about what he’s up to at MS and a few days later he came down to see us in sunny Bournemouth and we got into discussing the latest industry goings ons and where the Microsoft Expression suite, WPF and SilverLight (then WPF/e) fits in. Turns out he’s a pretty cool guy and has a pretty cool job of liaising with the developer community and trying to push and gather feedback on the whole Expression outfit. He offered me a place on this early adopters course and me, being one for expanding my (and my businesses) horizons rather than spouting off uneducated, ill-researched rants about my love/hatred/bandwagoning-opinion on various technology companies, accepted.

Yeaaaah, but WHY?
Well, I’m well aware MS has been getting a bit of a bashing from the Adobe crowd (dev community and the more corporately associated) of late. I’m also obviously not anti-Adobe myself. Far from it, I’ve been developing with Flash since early Flash 4, I’ve blogged enthusiastically about Apollo, Flash and Flex for nearly a year (late starter in comparison to some but have been reading and commenting on blogs for years). I’ve attended several Flash conferences and regularly travelled the 3+ hours to London for the monthly MMUG and now LFPUG meets. However, I have also been a long-time user of Microsoft technologies, I’ve developed in .net for several years, both ASP.Net and Windows Apps development, before that I developed in VB and classic ASP, am fluent in SQL Server and have managed several dedicated MS web servers over the past few years.

So… I’m an Adobe AND MS fanboy? Kind of, but I also run my own Linux server (on which this site is hosted), am in no way adverse to owning a Mac, am increasingly familiar with Apache, PHP and MySQL, am interested in several Open Source projects and generally like to keep tuned to as much as possible in the web and technology space.

So… (finally getting to the point) for me, taking an active interest in Expression and Silverlight was never a choice of ditching Adobe in favour of the MS alternative. I have no intention of stopping or slowing down any of my interest in Adobe, nor any other technology. I’m just prepared to arm myself with the relevant skills to understand the Expression toolset, familiarise myself with the merits and drawbacks of the available technologies and position myself in the best place possible to be able to accept projects requiring MS, Adobe or whatever technologies and being able to advise in an authoritative capacity which is the right technology to use for which specific projects.

I’ve been getting a bit hacked off with the side-swiping and name-calling going on in our industry of late. And think it’s time for these companies to stop wasting time trying to make each other look bad and start concentrating on their products and their developers. We’re now spoiled for choice with some amazing technologies, let us get our teeth into them without feeling guilty and let us do some amazing stuff with those technologies. You won’t influence by bad-mouthing, you’ll influence by supporting, listening and reacting to your developer communities.

Sorry, now the rant is over, I’ll get back to posting on the week’s progress as I delve into the unknown world of Expression.

I was just having a conversation with Ryan (through the medium of geek - aka twitter and blog comments) and we established a concept of “enterprise widgets”.

It’s not really a new concept rather than a different outlook on the “widget” concept. It is also something that Apollo is an ideal platform for developing.

In Ryan’s post he demonstrated use cases of when to focus on a browser app vs when to focus on a desktop app. One of the points about when to target the desktop was:

You’re building a “widget” application. Widgets are becoming bigger and bigger (in terms of capability) and you just can’t run a widget platform inside the browser. Widgets need to be accessible from the desktop, where they can take up a small space and be easily moved around. The browser restricts that too much.

He then asked for other ideas to which I responded:

Something that I’ve been harping on about a bit lately is the opportunity of a “desktop web service” (service in the desktop sense, not a web service). So that’s not too clear and a better term is needed, I think an example is in order:

Say you were a trader and wanted to be notified when certain things happened to rates/markets. With a desktop app you can have a form of service (or invisible app) that runs in the background watching the trading web services, when something pertinent happens you can fire into action informing the user.

This is a use case for a desktop app as you don’t want the user to rely on having a browser window open on a specific website.

Clear as mud? Wicked, I think i need to go away and create this application to aid my ill-eloquent thoughts-to-text abilities.

Ryan alerted me to the fact that my suggestion IS a widget of sorts. However, for myself, the term widget conjurs up the image of a small funky looking app that runs on your desktop and is used for fun, interest or time-passing E.g. weather reports, RSS readers, traffic warnings etc. In light of this I hadn’t associated my example (a corporate or enterprise type application) with the term “widget”.

So an “enterprise widget” is essentially a widget with or without a UI which can run as a desktop service until some event or action happens that would require further interaction with it (or another desktop or web application).

Another idea that could be classed as an enterprise widget is
Grant Skinners gTimer - I don’t know the specifics of this (it looks very cool and a something I’ve been wanting for a long time) but it could potentially run as an invisible application on your desktop (or just an icon in the system tray) and only prompt for client/project details when you open/close files and applications. Therefore negating the need to conciously update your timesheets when you switch projects.

Basically any action you need to take that needs to be responsive to some event or information change you can setup an enterprise widget to monitor activity and prompt with the necessary action based on certain flags. E.g. you could have an RSS reader that spurs you into a blogging frenzy whenever anyone mentions a specific term or technology you’re interested in.

Apollo seems to be the ideal choice for developing such enterprise widgets because of it sits squarely on the line between desktop and web. Making use of web services, desktop presence and desktop chromelessness (a word I just invented) are all key elements of the enterprise widget.

I’m not sure “Enterprise Widget” is the best term because, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t associated “widget” with a business tool but maybe that’s just me or maybe there is an existing definition that might be a better fit. I initially referred to it as a “desktop web service” but that was just plain confusing. Ideas?

Just re-reading a post I made a short while back on Apollo, where I mentioned a split between desktop application developers and web applications developers and thought I’d go into a little more depth here.

I am of the understanding that the target audience for Apollo is web developers, this is quite an obvious one really as one of the major benefits of Apollo is the re-use of existing web-based skill sets (flash, flex, html, ajax etc). This is also reflected in the positioning of Apollo from a marketing perspective (flash conferences and web dev conferences/user groups).

This will undoubtedly lead to an influx of “Rich Internet Desktop Application Developers” (can I be the first to publish the acronyms RIDA and RIDADs? :P). However what perhaps isn’t so planned for that I can foresee is the number of traditional “desktop application developers” coming out of the desktop woodwork to show these web devs the ins and outs of desktop application development. We went through a massive learning curve when we educated ourselves on developing applications for web. So much so that perhaps a certain amount of this education will need to be undone now we are venturing back to the desktop.

This is of course assuming there is any form of distinction between a desktop app developer and an internet application developer? Personally I would say I started out as a web developer, became a desktop application developer and now sit somewhere in between desktop and web application developer (when I have a developer hat on of any sort). I would certainly not be surprised if a number of web developers have never developed traditional desktop applications nor intended to that are now considering the shift to application development with the advent of Apollo.

My queries that we will see answered throughout 2007 and beyond are:

Might Apollo also lead to more traditional desktop application developers delving into web technologies to get their hands dirty with Apollo?
Will there be a clash of web app developers vs desktop app developers arguing over how things should be done on the desktop?
Will there be a new breed of application that is exploited through the leveraging of desktop and web apps on a single platform?

Niqui has posted something many people are getting more and more frustrated by lately, “Fair Usage”. This term is being overly abused and is a blatent form of misleading the public.

Whenever you read the term “Unlimited” be sure to check the small print, in this day and age Unlimited actually translates to Limited in advertising speak. Also feel free to kick up a stink with the customer service representative you discuss it with, it makes them feel awkward when questioned “then surely thats limited?” so they might feedback to their superiors and something MIGHT get done about it.

I recently involved myself in the sharing of frustrations about shocking customer service from banks and telecoms providers in the UK with Aral.

Today I had some troubles with one of our customer’s emails apparently not being received, we use MDaemon mail server. I hit a brick wall and called the guys at ZenSoftware who we purchased the software through… in fact I called them three times and emailed them once. Every time they told me exactly what I needed to know. The one time I called and couldn’t get through they returned my call within 10 minutes and my email was also responded to almost immediately.

I figure people don’t tend to shout about good customer service so have decided to start mentioning positive experiences as well as bad.

AOL, the wonderful company that they are, require any mail to be sent to them to be from a server with a valid reverse DNS lookup (ptr) record. If you’re finding emails bouncing back from AOL (and some others) make sure your mail server’s domain name server has an an appropriate ptr record setup.

This is actually a fairly resonable anti-spam measure, however try finding out from AOL that’s the problem isn’t so reasonable. Anyway posting this as we’ve had this issue a couple of times and would make for a good reference.

To check you have an appropriate reverse dns setup, goto www.dnsstuff.com and enter the IP of your mailserver into the 2nd field in the middle. at the bottom if you’re okay it should say:
Answer:

83.98.149.130 PTR record: mail.moov2.com. [TTL 172800s] [A=83.98.149.130]

if not you’ll get some message saying no reverse lookup or similar.

I’m pretty sure that almost any business or freelancer/contractor has wondered about the validity of Email contracts and personal guarentees. This article on the IoD site summarises a recent case.

In this case, an email containing the offer of a personal guarantee of £25,000 was sent by the director of one company to another company that was seeking to wind it up over unpaid debts; when the other company tried to enforce the personal guarantee, the High Court judge ruled that there was no ’signature’, as required by the legislation relating to personal guarantees, despite the presence of the sender’s email address in the header of the email. However, the judge confirmed that, if someone with the requisite authority had typed his name or initials in the body of the email, that would have been sufficient to make the offer enforceable.

Worth bearing in mind as reliance on Email is so prevalent in today’s business dealings.

NOTE: this is related to UK law.