Silverback - for Usability!

Thursday, August 07, 2008

I heard about Silverback on Monday from Jen at Thinkgeek, and after testing it out by myself at home, I decided to bring my Macbook into the office today and show off how easy (and cheap) usability testing can be with Silverback - a wonderful new application from Clearleft.

Without going too deep into the details, after I made one single live recording of myself using the SAMHSA.gov website to find a specific grant and explained what this simple usability test could mean, the clients were so impressed that I was asked to make a "wish list" for this upcoming fiscal year in which we'd purchase a few MacBook's or iMac's, along with licenses for Silverback, and we'd finally get to open our own USABILITY LAB! Nice!

I've been pushing for having Mac's here at the office for a few years now, and thanks to Silverback and the sheer simplicity of it, it looks like that may finally be coming to fruition!

Anybody looking to get quality usability testing done on the cheap, Silverback is the way to go!

Technorati Tags: Usability, Silverback.

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It's back!

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

A List Apart has put up it's second "The Survey For People Who Make Websites". Last year was their first survey and the results were extremely interesting to anyone in the IT field - specifically to website developers and designers.

I just took the survey for this year, now it's your turn. Click on the image below to get started. No personally identifiable data will be collected.

Technorati Tags: A List Apart, The Survey For People Who Make Websites.

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Your vs. You're

Monday, July 28, 2008

An important lesson for everyone to try and remember:

Props to The Warehouse for the use of their awesome comic.

Technorati Tags: The Warehouse, Grammar.

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First Impressions: iPhone 2.0 Firmware & App's Store

Friday, July 11, 2008

Ever since Apple formally announced the iPhone 3G I've been contemplating whether or not to replace my purchased-in-May-God-damnit 1st generation iPhone or simply wait it out for a model with 32gb or more of storage. Since the 2.0 firmware was going to be released - for free - for first gen iPhone owners, I decided to keep the first gen and "live without" GPS and 3G voice and data.

Thursday, around lunchtime, I went home and put the (leaked, thanks Gizmodo!) 2.0 firmware on my first gen iPhone and, after what seemed like a scary 35 minute firmware update (thought it had locked up on me!), started downloading Apps from the all-new App Store. The first thing I noticed with the 2.0 firmware is that Apple finally added a link on the home screen to the Contacts application, so that you didn't have to access the phone app every time you wanted to look up a contacts name or address. Very convenient!

The second and third things I noticed happened when I was adding a new e-mail account. First, the new push-based e-mail system is wonderfully fast and in my opinion will give RIM a run for its money (rumor is that Apple is working on an Enterprise version of the iPhone for businesses, so, nyah RIM!). The other great thing I discovered about the 2.0 firmware is that you can now see the characters you're typing in for passwords, instead of just seeing black dots. Used to be frustrating as hell to try and get a complex alpha-numeric-special character password in properly without being able to see whether or not the key you hit was right. Well done on that one, Apple.

Now, on to the App Store and the applications within! This is why I didn't jailbreak my iPhone. The App Store is well done, and the fact that over 500 quality applications were already available yesterday is spectacular. I downloaded a ton of free applications yesterday including: AIM (works great!), Remote (great iTunes remote control!), Google (eh), Mobile Flickr (yay!), Facebook, Myspace, WeatherBug (needs some work), Shazam (I've missed this one so much since I abandoned my Nokia N95), VoiceNotes, BoxOffice, and Twitterific. I also bought BattleAtSea (neat battleship game), and Band - which is a truly unique and innovative application for anyone who loves making music. I'm sure my bass teacher is going to love it when he sees it this weekend.

Overally, I don't really feel like I'm missing anything by upgrading my old iPhone to the new firmware. 3G data costs $10 more a month and doesn't really make a big difference to me, and since I've already got a GPS navigator for my car, I don't really feel like I'm missing out on that either - especially since the A-GPS built into the first gen iPhone works so well anyway.

Kudos to Apple on a wonderful upgrade to what I believe is the best gadget on the market today.

Technorati Tags: Gizmodo, Apple, iPhone, App Store, Jesus Phone, RIM.

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Banana Hammock

Monday, June 02, 2008

While staying with my father in New Jersey over the Memorial Day weekend, I discovered this lovely item in his kitchen:

Yes. A miniature hammock with a bunch of bananas in it. A banana hammock. My father didn't get it. The humor was entirely lost on him.

Technorati Tags: Banana Hammock.

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The Big Word Project

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Big Word Project is a fun little project setup by two guys from Northern Ireland whose main goal is to study how different words mean different things to different people. Well, that's their stated goal, anyway. I'm sure that one of their unstated goals is to make money.

To participate in the project, you go to their website, TheBigWordProject.com, and search for words. You can then "purchase" a word at the price of $1.00 per letter. By purchasing a word, you can have it link to any website of your choosing, thus redefining the word. For instance, Greg Storey at Airbag Industries purchased "singular" - a great word for him in my opinion - which now links to his site.

After a good 30 second of thought, I purchased "schadenfreude" - my very favorite word in the entire world - which means "to take enjoyment from the misfortune of others." Basically, being an asshole. I like that. It pleases me. You can find a link to my word on the sidebar of this site, just below the search box.

Was it a waste of $13? No way. I really dig neat little projects like theirs. It's a nice departure from normal word play, and let's face it - free marketing for my terrible, horrible, no-good blog. One thing is certain, though: You can expect to read more schadenfreude stories on here now!

Technorati Tags: schadenfreude, The Big Word Project.

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CMS for the Accessible Federal Agency

Friday, April 25, 2008

Every now and then I'm tasked with an especially interesting assignment at the office. A real "humdinger" of a task that breaks the cycle of normalcy and helps to pad the old resume. By default my job tends to revolve around a few tasks that are repeated throughout the weeks and months: website design, maintenance, Section 508 issue resolution, UI support, and helping to write standard operating procedures/white papers. So when new, important tasks come up, I always jump at the chance to help break the monotony. Today was one of those big days.

Today I was tasked with taking the lead on picking a Content Management System (CMS) for the federal agency that I currently work for on-site. It's a very big, very important responsibility that will have a deep impact on everything that I and the web team here do from now until the end of our contract in four years. This will steer the direction that we go and lock us into a very expensive piece of software. Obviously not a task to take lightly.

So, what is it we're looking for in our CMS? Well, the "need-to-haves" are:

• Works on the .NET / IIS platform with SQL/Oracle database support
• Generates valid XHTML
• Uses templates that are/can be easily made to be Section 508
• Costs under $30k
• Can be implemented on both an Intranet and Internet site
• Highly scalable
• Licensed and supported commercially
• Includes a user friendly WYSIWYG editor for non-technical content managers

Those are the basic elements of the CMS solution that we're looking for. At first glance those seem like a lot of requirements, but really those are just skimming the surface. Cost will probably be an issue and if we decide to go with one of the more expensive packages there will no doubt be discussions back and forth about whether or not it's worth it.

So far in my research, I've come across three CMS packages that fit the basic bill. The first (and best fit thus far) is Percussion Software's Rhthymix, which ironically is being used by HHS. It's got a lot of bang for the buck, and seems to be fairly easy to implement. The price is also listed as "negotiable", which means it's either ridiculously expensive or might actually be within our budget.

The other two packages I've found thus far are called Immediacy CMS and RedDot CMS, which seems to be the more solid of the two at first glance, but starts at $55k - way out of our price range. Never the less, it's going to stay on the list for the initial presentation.

Next Steps

As today was the first day of this project, obviously nothing major will come of what progress has been made thus far. The process of picking out our CMS is going to be long and thorough since it represents a major paradigm shift in the way we currently get our content out onto the web.

After picking out three or four solid CMS packages I'll call the vendors to ask the tough questions (price, support, availability, scale, upgrades, true Section 508 compliance, etc.) as well as try and setup a good date for them to come out and give us a nice demo. That's followed up by discussion, demo testing, more discussion, and then the real work begins: setup, implementation, and moving content from flat ASPX pages to clean, database-driven content.

There's a lot of work ahead of me, and I don't see this really getting to the decision point until May or June, but that will give us a lot of time to get our pages cleaned up and ready for the transition and for me to continue growing my hair out I'll have something to tear out while the transition is going on.

Technorati Tags: cms, content management system, immediacy, reddot, rhythmix.

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