Last week we presented at FOSDEM, under the theme of: Secure, Federated Communication. Here’s the video.
50¢ user testing
It’s painful to realise the harsh difference between:
“I think I know how people use our website”
and
“Why is he clicking there? Can’t he see you have to click on the follow button before you can post? Aaaarch!”
User testing is painful: it shows up your false assumptions. The great news is that the sooner you know, the sooner you can begin sanding off the rough edges in your product.
There are some user testing services that charge $39 per test. This approach will cost you 50¢ per test and give you a video of a complete newbie using your website.
The trick is a combination of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Screencast-o-matic.
Here are the steps to begin testing:
- Sign up and create a HIT (Human Intelligence Tasks) in Mechanical Turk. For simplicity click on Create Hit Individually The other forms are too complicated for our needs.
- When creating your HIT, in Answer Format, select: File upload. Our users are going to upload their screencast here.
- Provide detailed instructions. Here’s a current test that we are running at buddycloud:
- Go to http://screencast-o-matic.com/ and hit “start recording”.
- Go to https://beta.buddycloud.org and hit register.
- (screencast-o-matic will record your voice) tell us about what you see and how you find the registration process.
- Log in at https://beta.buddycloud.com
- Tell us what you think of buddycloud. What is your first impression of buddycloud?
- Follow a channel on the buddycloud website.
- How could we could improve this sign-up service.
- Go back to your screencast-o-matic screen and stop the recording.
- Upload your screencast-o-matic recording to this Mechanical-turk HIT’s upload box.
- Have a lovely day!
- Set a rate per HIT. 50¢ per test gets a good response rate.
- Mechanical Turk will email you when a new file is uploaded. Download and share with your team. And don’t forget to approve the HIT so that your worker gets paid.
I hope this helps you with your user testing. It’s helping us find out where we can improve at buddycloud.
Happy testing
Learn Coffeescript with an expert (and hack on the buddycloud webclient)
Dodo has kindly offered a repeat of his popular Coffeescript intro course.
His session will get you ramped up with the fundamentals of coffeescript and he’ll do a code walkthrough of the buddycloud webclient code.
To join, add your name to this Doodle form: http://www.doodle.com/khnd7kwwe5rc65nt
We’ll do this through a Google hangout - so leave your contact details on the Doodle and we’ll email you when we fire up the hangout.
Your host. (photo taken by ft at the last bc hackerthon)
Source: secure.flickr.com
Google sponsors two great developers to work on buddycloud
buddycloud is really proud to be working with two great students from Google’s Summer of Code program.
Denis Washington will be building an HTTP API to buddycloud.
buddycloud has an event driven architecture (everything in buddycloud is realtime and events can happen on any domain that runs buddycloud).
Soon, developers who want to extend buddycloud will benefit from the new HTTP API: Denis’s HTTP API will give developers a nice way to plug existing JSON-based queries into buddycloud’s realtime architecture. buddycloud users will still have the “ooooh this is fast and nice” experience.
Rodrigo Duarte will be building a buddycloud media server (GSOC proposal).
The buddycloud media server makes it so simple to drag and drop media into a channel and chat message. Media is magically permissioned to the person you are talking with or the followers of your channel. But simple-to-use will mean that Rodrigo will be working hard on a design that removes all user confusion and “just works”.
I’m really looking forward to working with Rodrigo and Denis and to using their code in production.
Also, a huge thanks to Kev for coordinating and organising the Google summer of code. Without him, none of this would be possible. Thanks Kev.
Welcome Google summer of code programmers!
