We made Chris Brogan’s Rockstar list

Posted on December 24, 2008
Filed Under Blog promotion | Leave a Comment

It’s a list of  of different blogs, he finds useful around the web. http://www.chrisbrogan.com/rockstars/

I’m not sure how we got there but we’re there.

Thanks Chris!

What is usability testing?

Posted on December 22, 2008
Filed Under Usability, User Experience Design | Leave a Comment

As you may know (if you follow my blog, twitter or are friends with me on Facebook) that I have been recruiting for Boston Pizza’s usability testing for our new website. Once I blogged, twittered and facebooked (not sure if that is even a word!) about it I had a flood of emails and messages asking what exactly was entailed. This week, I decided I should write my blog post to explain usability testing.

Here the Wikipedia’s version of the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system.[1] This is in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.

Usability testing focuses on measuring a human-made product’s capacity to meet its intended purpose. Examples of products that commonly benefit from usability testing are web sites or web applications, computer interfaces, documents, or devices. Usability testing measures the usability, or ease of use, of a specific object or set of objects, whereas general human-computer interaction studies attempt to formulate universal principles.

And usability testing in Layman’s terms:

A way to test if a website is going to be easy to use. It is where we ask real people to perform tasks on a website. If the users find the tasks easy, while the website has accomplished it’s goals and if the users find the tasks difficult to complete then the website needs some work.

Last week, we tested the new Boston Pizza website. We recruited users from across the country. For this reason, we tested some users remotely and some came into the Habanero office.

Here are some great articles on to two types of testing we did.

Lab usability testing ( where users actually come to see you ) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/11/lab-usability-testing-what-why-how-much.html

Remote Usability Testing: http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/article/2006/07/guide-to-remote-usability-testing.html

We are in the midst of redesigning our website and need your help!

Posted on December 11, 2008
Filed Under Random Thoughts, Uncategorized, Usability | Leave a Comment

We are looking for a number of people to participate in a study geared
towards refining the new design of our website. The study generally
takes approximately 90 minutes where a facilitator will walk you
through a number of tasks on a proposed site design.

I am currently looking for participants in:

  • Manitoba
  • Nova Scotia
  • Quebec
  • Ontario

As a target user, you are in the best position to tell us whether the
design and content organization makes it easy to use our site. As a
thank you we will be offering selected participants $75 Boston Pizza Gift Cards.

If you are willing and able to participate on Wednesday Dec 17, 2008 or Friday December 17, 2008, please reply to
Alicia Harper at harpera@bostonpizza.com with your contact details and the best time to reach
you. I will need to confirm a few details to ensure that we have a
number of different types of participants.

For the testing you a not required to go anywere, all testing can be done from home on your own computer.

Edited to add December 22,2008 – Usability testing is complete

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