need usability feedback? I'd love to help

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi everyone,

If you need a fresh set of eyes to go through your site and see if anything's confusing or frustrating, I'd love to lend a hand. Just drop me an email :slight_smile:

What do I get out of it? I just love the "exercise". Also, I'd just like to communicate with other developers.

So if you'd like feedback, just let me know! Daniel

2

I am curious, do you have expertise in usability testing (as a user role) or usability/rails/web dev experience in general?

I don't have anything hosted, and won't likely in the future, but co-ordinating usability tests 'hallway style' is intruiging (especially if you can use video-conferencing and VoIP/IM so that you can get the proper user context necessary for meaningful tests).

3

I've conducted a number of usability tests and think I'm decent at spotting potential problems and communicating them.

I made my first professional web site about 6 years ago and I've been using Rails since last November. I was the lead programmer for http://masterformat.com, as well as other projects which I can't list here. In my spare time I created happycarpools.com using rails, which was pretty fun :slight_smile:

Usability became really important to me after I started doing online marketing and had people asking me to do SEO but not to improve their site. I realized that you're really wasting your money if you're paying to increase traffic that ends up leaving because your site is too confusing or frustrating to deal with. So I've spent a lot more time working with usability so that I can explain its importance to clients and help my clients create actually successful sites.

Usability's even more important now, I think, with the use of AJAX and DOM scripting to make pages behave in unexpected, unconventional ways.

If you'd like to read some of my thoughts on user experience/usability, I've started writing a series of articles: which hopefully are helpful: http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/2006/9/4/how-to-think-about-user-experience-mental-models (The site, btw, uses Mephisto, Rick Olson's awesome blog system)

I definitely like the idea of using video-conferencing and VoIP :slight_smile:

If you want to have something hosted let me know as well - I've just ordered a VPS from slicehost that has more space than I'll likely need for awhile, and after I get it set up I'd like to hosting some small (50-100mb, usually that's plenty) accounts for free. Also, if you check out the Rails wiki there are some free Rails hosts listed.

Thanks! Daniel